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A HISTORY OF THE ASYLUMS FOR THE INSANE IN MICHIGAN BY HENRY M. HURD, M. D.
How many years of hopeless misery might have been averted had this poor woman received curative treatment at the proper time ! I also recall many cases of harmless dementia who wandered restlessly about the country- They were known as "fools. " Among the number I can remember "Smith's fool, " "Gates' fool" and "Olin's fool. " They were a great terror to young children and defenseless females. It was considered a good joke to send them about from one farmhouse to another, especially in the night, or to frighten them away when they came as unwelcome guests at midnight. Two, at least, of these "fools, " as they were called, I remember to have perished in burning barns where they had sought shelter at night from failure to secure other accommodations.
If the friends of a patient were able to pay the cost of the journey to an eastern state, he was generally taken to an eastern institution—generally to Brattleboro, Vt, or Utica, N. Y. In some rare instances counties appropriated money for the treatment of peculiarly necessitous patients in eastern asylums. In the first report of the superintendents of the poor to the secretary of state an item of expenditure is to be found for the treatment of one Smith, at Utica.
The immediate initiative of a movement to start an asylum in Michigan I have always understood to be the affliction of a prominent citizen of one of the southern counties, who had an insane wife and two insane children confined in different rooms in his house at the same time.
MICHIGAN ASYLUMS
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