Nowadays, we have a decent understanding of mental health and many who need help can find it in psychiatric hospitals.
That was not always the case, though. In the past, people with mental issues were sent to lunatic asylums; not to get treatment, but to keep them out of the way of the general population. Many historical figures finished their days in such an institution, long forgotten by the world around them.
10. The Savior of Mothers
Nowadays, Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis is remembered as the “savior of mothers” for his efforts to get maternity doctors to wash their hands to limit the spread of childbed fever. And the reward for his work was getting locked up in an asylum where he was abused and beaten by the guards, dying a short while later from an untreated gangrenous wound.
Semmelweis began his medical career in 1846 as an obstetrical assistant at the Vienna General Hospital. The institution had two maternity wards for underprivileged women, and Semmelweis noticed that the one where he worked had a much higher maternal mortality rate caused by childbed fever – almost five times higher, in fact.
What was the source of this huge discrepancy? Semmelweis eliminated each possible motive one by one until he concluded. His ward was staffed by doctors, the other by midwives. What did they do differently? The midwives washed their hands, that’s what. Semmelweis told his students to start washing their hands before working with patients and he saw the mortality rate plummet. He then published his findings, hoping to start a medical revolution.
The medical world, however, was not ready to listen because Semmelweis’s ideas went against established opinion. Instead, he was ridiculed and criticized by his colleagues and spent the next two decades screaming into the void uselessly. Semmelweis became a pariah. He took to drinking and openly bashing his critics with vitriol and desperation.
Eventually, Semmelweis had a mental breakdown and was committed to an asylum in 1865. He died of sepsis just a few weeks later and his passing was barely acknowledged by the medical community.
9. The Woman Who Joined the Army
Hannah Snell was an 18th-century British woman who became rather notorious for disguising herself as a man and joining the military.
Snell’s unusual career path started in 1745 when she decided to assume the identity of her brother-in-law, James Gray, and head out into the world alone to find her husband who had left her a few years earlier. After discovering that he was dead, she enlisted in the army as James Gray. She kept her secret for a while but deserted after spotting an old neighbor and fearing that he might recognize her. Instead of going home, though, Hannah simply traded the army for the Royal Marines, thus likely becoming the first woman to join this fighting arm of the British military.
She served for several years, sailing first to Lisbon and then to India where she took a bullet to the groin in battle and enlisted the help of a local woman to remove the bullet to maintain her secret identity. Snell finished her tour of duty in 1750 and returned home to her sister. According to legend, she revealed her deception in a pub full of soldiers. Hannah later sold her story to a London publisher and even received a lifetime pension for her service. She lived a long life, but her mental condition deteriorated towards the end, and she was committed to the infamous Bedlam asylum where she died in 1792.
8. The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet
Described as England’s finest rural poet, John Clare had an unrivaled knack for writing poetry that vividly depicted the natural beauty of the English countryside.
Born in 1793 in the East Midlands, Clare’s working-class credentials were unimpeachable – he was the son of a farm laborer, who had to work the fields himself from a young age to help support his family. He published his first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Live and Scenery in 1820, but despite his writing receiving lots of praise, he struggled financially all his life and had to keep working manual labor jobs to make ends meet.
This took a toll on Clare, both physically and mentally, and in 1836 his doctor recommended he stay at High Beech asylum in Essex to recuperate. He spent five years there before simply walking out one day and making the 80-mile journey home on foot. However, his respite was brief, and five months later, he was back inside, this time at the Northampton Lunatic Asylum where Clare lived out the last 23 years of his life. He described the place as “the purgatorial hell and French bastille of English liberty, where harmless people are trapped and tortured until they die.”
7. The Man Who Drew Cats
From an English poet, we move on to an English painter – specifically, Louis Wain, a 19th-century London outsider artist who became best known for his pictures of cats. It’s a shame he didn’t live in the Internet age, he would be the most famous artist in the world. Instead, he ended up penniless in a pauper’s asylum.
Unfortunately, his career had a tragic start. Married at 23, Wain’s wife was soon diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. To cheer her up, Wain would draw caricatures of their family cat, Peter. These were meant to be private, but an editor for the Illustrated London News saw them and liked them and commissioned Wain to draw more for his newspaper. Before you knew it, all of London knew Wain as “the man who drew cats.”
Compared to other entries, Louis Wain ended up in an asylum at an advanced age. He was always a bit on the eccentric side, but in his later years, his eccentricity turned to abuse and violence towards his sisters who lived with him. Therefore, in 1924, the 64-year-old Wain was committed to Springfield Hospital in Tooting. He was later moved to nicer accommodations in Bethlem Hospital following a public campaign backed by the Prime Minister at the time, Ramsay MacDonald, and he was allowed to quietly work on his art for the rest of his life.
6. The Murderous Mathematician
In the mathematical world, André Bloch is remembered for his work in complex analysis, and for having a theorem and a constant named after him. However, his achievements sit under a dark cloud, as Bloch did all his work inside a mental asylum, where he spent most of his adult life after killing three people.
Born in 1893 in Besançon, France, André and his brother Georges were drafted into the army during World War I and both were injured during service. Georges, after losing an eye, was released from service. André, meanwhile, although he was allowed to return home to recuperate, was expected back. This never happened, though, because while on leave, André Bloch murdered his brother, his aunt, and his uncle.
Afterward, Bloch was committed to the Charenton asylum in the suburbs of Paris, where he spent the next 31 years of his life. The motive behind his crimes remains unclear, but Bloch described it to his psychiatrist as a simple matter of eugenics. He said that mental illness ran in his family on his mother’s side, so he wanted to wipe out that entire branch and only lamented that he didn’t get to finish the job. When his doctor told him that this was a terrifying approach to life, Bloch simply responded:
“You are using emotional language. Above all there is mathematics and its laws.”
5. The Minister of Murder
Born in England in 1880, Thomas Ley moved to Australia in 1886 where he later served as the Minister of Justice for New South Wales and then a Member of Parliament. His career, however, was fraught with controversies and accusations, the most serious of which was the fact that several of his opponents and detractors ended up dead under mysterious circumstances.
Eventually, the dark clouds surrounding Ley cost him his political career, so he moved back to England with his mistress, Maggie Brook, where he continued his dubious shenanigans. These included some shady real estate deals, promoting a bogus sweepstakes, and acting as a black market dealer during World War II.
Thomas Ley reached the end of the line in 1947 when he was accused, charged, and convicted in a sensational crime dubbed by the British press as the “Chalkpit murder.” He arranged the death of a man named John McBain Mudie whom he believed was having an affair with Brook. He was due to hang but had his sentence commuted to life in prison at the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Ultimately, it didn’t matter, since Ley had a cerebral hemorrhage and died soon after being imprisoned.
4. The Mad Archer
Despite what the title might suggest, this story is not about a deranged hunter, but rather a man named Archer – specifically, a 19th-century Scottish actor named Richard Archer Prince. Born near Dundee in 1858, Prince began working in theater from an early age and around 1875 moved to London to make it big.
He didn’t. He mostly had bit parts and always struggled financially, sometimes having to rely on a charity known as the Actor’s Benevolent Fund for assistance. He began drinking heavily and exhibiting odd behavior, which earned him the moniker of “the Mad Archer” from his fellow thespians.
At the exact opposite end of the spectrum sat William Terriss. He was one of the most popular actors of his day. He knew Prince and occasionally tried to find him work, but this did not stop the latter from resenting him due to his success. Eventually, Prince was denied assistance from the Actor’s Benevolent Fund and he, somehow, got it into his head that this was Terriss’s doing. He got his revenge one night by waiting for Terriss outside the Adelphi Theater and stabbing him to death when he arrived.
Prince showed no remorse for his crime. He was obviously found guilty, but judged insane and was sent to Broadmoor. He spent the next 40 years of his life there and became involved with the local entertainment, finally finding a captive audience.
3. America’s First Supermodel
That is just one of the monikers of New York beauty Audrey Munson. She was also dubbed the “American Venus,” “Miss Manhattan,” and many others. She was the model for the Walking Liberty Half Dollar and statues of her still stand proudly at American landmarks such as the Manhattan Bridge, the Pulitzer Fountain, and the Sleepy Hollow cemetery. And yet, she died forgotten in an insane asylum and was buried in an unmarked grave.
Her troubles began in 1919. The man who owned the boarding house Audrey lived in with her mother, a doctor named Walter Wilkins, had become dangerously obsessed with her to the point that he murdered his wife so the two of them could be together. Although Audrey had no role in the killing, the scandal torpedoed her career and, unable to find any more work, she moved to Syracuse with her mother. Despite her fame, she never earned that much as a model, and what she did earn she spent, so the pair was broke and Audrey’s mother had to sell kitchen utensils door-to-door to make ends meet.
This drastic lifestyle change caused Munson to attempt suicide in 1922. In the years that followed, she became more unstable, so on her 40th birthday, her mother had her committed to the St. Lawrence State Hospital for the Insane. She was briefly moved to a nursing home, but Audrey kept running away from there, so she was moved back to the mental institution. She died in 1996, at the age of 104.
2. The Marquis de Sade
Donatien Alphonse François de Sade might be the most notorious French author in history, although everyone knows him better under the name of the Marquis de Sade. His novels outraged 18th-century France due to their depictions of sex, violence, blasphemy, and sadism, a word which, you guessed it, is named after him.
It seems that the Marquis enjoyed at least some of the topics he wrote about in his own life, which led to his arrest and imprisonment on multiple occasions. Usually, he was let off with a fine or his family used its influence to secure his release following a brief stay in custody.
This worked until it didn’t. Specifically, until the French Revolution which ended the monarchy and brought Napoleon to power. He absolutely loathed de Sade’s work, calling it “abominable” and the writings of “a depraved imagination.” Napoleon had the Marquis arrested again in 1801 and, this time, there was no reprieve. De Sade was diagnosed with “libertine dementia” and committed to an insane asylum for the last 11 years of his life. He spent that time writing and putting on plays. At least, until 1809 when he was sent to solitary confinement, had all pens and paper confiscated, and was denied any more visitors.
1. The Great Composer
As one of the greatest German composers of the Romantic era, Robert Schumann needs no introduction. Born in 1810 in the Kingdom of Saxony, Schuman began studying music at age seven and, not long after, was working on his own compositions. Despite dying at the age of 46, Schumann composed almost 150 works.
He might have been even more prolific if he hadn’t struggled with mental illness throughout his life. In 1854, his delusions became strong enough that he feared he might harm his family. After attempting suicide by jumping off the Rhine Bridge, Schumann requested that he be committed to an insane asylum where he spent another two years before his death.
What exactly was the cause of his psychosis has been hotly debated ever since and there is still no concrete answer. His doctor at the asylum claimed Schumann’s condition was brought on by overwork and exhaustion. Others believe that the composer suffered from schizophrenia or manic-depressive disorder, and even studied his works to see if any symptoms were reflected in his music. It’s possible it ran in the family, since Robert’s mother had bouts of depression, his father once suffered a nervous breakdown, and his sister committed suicide.
Even the Nazis tried their hand at diagnosing Schumann, although they quickly concluded that he suffered from vascular dementia – a physiological condition. After all, to them, Robert Schumann was a hero of German music, and they couldn’t promote anyone with psychiatric problems like that.