Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions

A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation's Capital

Martin Summers

First book-length academic history of Saint Elizabeths Hospital
Extensive use of patient case files
One of a small number of histories of mental illness/psychiatry that use race as a category of analysis

Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions

A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation's Capital

Martin Summers

Description

From the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, Saint Elizabeths Hospital was one of the United States' most important institutions for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. Founded in 1855 to treat insane soldiers and sailors as well as civilian residents in the nation's capital, the institution became one of the country's preeminent research and teaching psychiatric hospitals. From the beginning of its operation, Saint Elizabeths admitted black patients, making it one of the few American asylums to do so. This book is a history of the hospital and its relationship to Washington, DC's African American community. It charts the history of Saint Elizabeths from its founding to the late-1980s, when the hospital's mission and capabilities changed as a result of deinstitutionalization, and its transfer from the federal government to the District of Columbia. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including patient case files, the book demonstrates how race was central to virtually every aspect of the hospital's existence, from the ways in which psychiatrists understood mental illness and employed therapies to treat it to the ways that black patients experienced their institutionalization. The book argues that assumptions about the existence of distinctive black and white psyches shaped the therapeutic and diagnostic regimes in the hospital and left a legacy of poor treatment of African American patients, even after psychiatrists had begun to reject racialist conceptions of the psyche. Yet black patients and their communities asserted their own agency and exhibited a "rights consciousness" in large and small ways, from agitating for more equal treatment to attempting to manage the therapeutic experience.

Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions

A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation's Capital

Martin Summers

Introduction
Chapter 1: "Humanity Requires All the Relief Which Can Be Afforded": The Birth of the Federal Asylum
Chapter 2: The Paradox of Enlightened Care: Saint Elizabeths in the Era of Moral Treatment, 1855-1877
Chapter 3: "From Slave to Citizen": Race, Insanity, and Institutionalization in Post-Reconstruction Washington, DC, 1877-1900
Chapter 4: Care and the Color Line: Race, Rights, and the Therapeutic Experience, 1877-1900
Chapter 5: "Mechanisms of the Negro Mind": Race and Dynamic Psychiatry at Saint Elizabeths, 1903-1937
Chapter 6: "He Is Psychotic and Always Will Be": Racial Ambivalence and the Limits of Therapeutic Optimism, 1903-1937
Chapter 7: Mental Hygiene and the Limits of Reform: Saint Elizabeths in the Community, 1903-1937
Chapter 8: "An Example for the Rest of the Nation": Challenging Racial Injustice at Saint Elizabeths, 1910-1955
Chapter 9: Whither the Negro Psyche: Integration and Its Aftermath, 1945-1970
Chapter 10: From Model to Emblem: Community Mental Health and Deinstitutionalization, 1963-1987
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions

A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation's Capital

Martin Summers

Author Information

Martin Summers is an associate professor of history and African and African diaspora studies at Boston College. His research and teaching interests are in African American history, race and medicine, and gender and sexuality. Summers's research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the National Humanities Center.