State Hospitals

State Hospitals

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Throughout history the treatment of vulnerable populations has been a dire experience for most of the people who were consigned to institutions of various kinds. 

The ubiquitous Asylum might be specific to physical conditions like Tuberculous or Polio. Others were created to house and allegedly treat feeble mindedness and insanity. The euphemistic "wayward women" encompassed many maladies and alleged maladies specific to the female gender. 

Orphanages abounded it times of global plagues and warfare. Any child who might pose an embarrassment to the family name would be spirited away to be raised by nuns and other clerical persons at locations far from the cities of their birth and family residence.

A relatively few institutions gained infamy in the annals of literature and cinema. The lion's share were perfunctory places people lived out their ordinary albeit unusual lives. 

Before medical science was able to figure out what to do about deformities and sensory limitations they warehoused the people in the State hospitals of one type or another. One person whom I became aware of was housed at the Rosewood State Hospital in Baltimore county for over 40 years on the diagnosis of "mental retardation" when it was later discovered he was merely deaf. He also had physical limitations so there was no motivation for anyone to do anything which would improve his life.

The tenancies are to vilify and sensationalize these places. While there are the horror stories to be heard and seen, many life situations were only what our society knew to do about the needs of the individuals.

States and the medical authorities sought to place the asylums and sanitariums and "school" in quiet rural (read isolated and hidden) locations. Hence the massive campuses of stone and brick architecture.

My emphasis on State institutions is not on the decaying interiors where peeling paint, flooded floors and rusty plumbing prevail. Rooms full of littered records, broken wheelchairs and recent graffiti make for the stuff of nightmares. My emphasis is on the exterior architecture and the landscape which exist in stark contrast to the dim forgotten interiors and the lives of people who once called the place home.

 

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