The treatment of the mentally ill has a notorious past filled with misunderstanding, torture, and theology. With the dawn of the 19th century, the path to comprehension began to be paved, ultimately leading to the psychology breakthroughs of Sigmund Freud, and the study of neurology. This is not to discount the terrible therapies the poor souls had to endure but to take a closer look at how the 19th century leads us to where we are today, and to highlight those few who really tried to help the mentally ill.

10Moral Treatment

The period of Enlightenment changed how scientists, philosophers, and society looked at the world. Psychiatry faced this new enlightened look, and moral treatment came out of it. This treatment was a moral disciplinary approach to those with mental illness instead of using chains and abuse.

According to Dr. James W Trent of Gordon College, before moral treatment, people with psychiatric conditions were referred to as insane, and treated inhumanely. Philippe Pinel of France at Bicetre Hospital, in Paris, advocated for moral treatment of the mentally ill. In place of physical abuse, Pinel called for kindness and patience, which included recreation, walks, and pleasant conversation. Pinel made this change out of reading, observation, and reflection; rather than a result of accident or experiment.

Moral treatment began to spread around the world. In the United States, Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician, began to practice moral treatment. Rush saw one of the causes of mental disease as the hustle and bustle of modern life, so taking those inflicted away from those stresses could help restore their minds.

Rush did employ some of the methods of moral treatment; conversely, he also used bloodletting and invented the tranquilizer chair.^[1] Pinel had high hopes for his new type of therapy, but there were still those who used tortuous techniques to restrain those they considered mad.

9Booming Asylums

We all have a terrible image of insane asylums, and a number of us have heard a ghost story or two surrounding these foreboding buildings. Often cared for by their families or housed in almshouses or jails, the number of people sent to asylums began to dramatically increase in the 19th century.

During the start of the century, cities became more populated, and mental illness shifted from being a spiritual punishment from God to a social issue. Communities responded by building more and more institutions, which were set up to handle the growing numbers.^[2] For example, in England, the number of “patients climbed from 10,000 in 1800 to ten times that in 1900.”

Historians have agreed upon three main bodies of thought to try and answer why the numbers catapulted in one century. The first is due to modernization and increased stresses that came with it. The second is the population grew more and more intolerant of disruptive behavior. The third is the growing power given to physicians and alienists—or mad-doctors. Being able to look back, we can see it looks to be a combination of all three.

With the booming numbers of asylums, lurid tales of torture and abuse began to leak out from the ominous structures placed on the outside of cities and towns. The mad-doctors set up a number of classifications, given to try and make the asylum “cure” those with psychiatric conditions. For example, men had to be separated from women, the curable from the incurable, etc. Nevertheless, with the rules and best of intentions, asylums earned their infamous nickname, Bedlam, “a byword for man’s inhumanity to man.”

8Rise in Research

Going to university to study a specific subject, has grown to be a commonality these days. In the 19th century, the increase in asylums and new treatments created a rise in those wanting to research psychiatry, and answer the plaguing question of why some people went “mad.”

For example, Oxford-educated physician Thomas Willis, who coined the term neurology, strove to pinpoint the mental functions that coordinate with particular parts of the brain. Willis modeled the idea that the central and peripheral nervous system depended on the operations of animal spirits, or, chemical intermediaries between the mind and the body.

Another doctor about this time, Archibald Pitcairn, who taught at Leiden in the Netherlands, treated mentally ill patients and argued that they suffered from “false ideas induced by the chaotic activities of those volatile animal spirits; these, in turn, fed back into the muscles to produce confused and uncontrolled movements in the limbs.”^[3]

Today, we know the brain does not contain animal spirits, and they do not cause mental illness; rather, it is chemical imbalances in the brain. For a time when X-ray was being discovered, and the only way to study the brain was to pull it out of a person’s skull, these doctors set the foundation for modern neurology and present-day treatments.

7Nervous Disorders

Today when someone suffers from a nervous disorder, they are referring to high blood pressure, heart problems, trouble breathing, etc.^[4] Back in the 19th century, nervous disorders referred to shattered nerves, nervous collapse, nervous exhaustion, or a nervous breakdown. The symptoms did not include heart problems or trouble breathing; but instead, a sense of emptiness, hopelessness, obsessive thoughts, sluggishness, and a general indifference.

This is where we got the saying about having “strong” or “weak” nerves. The idea of nervous disorders being a “functional illness” that only affected the “superior” people came from the scientific emphases that ran rampant during this time.

On both sides of the Atlantic, Victorian men were wallowing in hypochondria and Victorian women falling into hysteria. Private “nerve” clinics to treat this malady sprang up, where the rich could go the spa to recover from their nervous breakdowns. These disorders only glamorized mental illness and took away from the real understanding of what those poor people had to endure.

6Monomania

The 19th century was full of scientists seeking to find reasons and answers for why the mentally ill became that way. Doctors commonly believed that insanity was a defect of reason, and the person’s inability to rationally comprehend reality.

With the rise in research and study of the mentally ill, Jean Etienne Esquirol brought another hypothesis to try and answer why: Monomania. This is partial delirium, where the patient suffered from a false perception, which they then pursue with logical reasonings. These false perceptions can be illusions, hallucinations, or false convictions. Monomania is not an absence of reason, but the presence of a false idea.

For example, mentally ill patients can suffer from illusions and hallucinations, and it is these that convince the patients of an incorrect reality, to which they act out logically to this false perception.

Esquirol developed the diagnosis of monomania to explain paranoia disorders; such as, kleptomania, nymphomania, and pyromania, which all can be detected by a trained eye.^[5] Monomania provided the needed foundation for scientists and doctors to discover concepts such as obsession and psychopathy.

5The M’Naghten Rules

On January 20, 1843, a Scottish craftsman, Daniel M’Naghten, believed Tories and Conservatives were intent on murdering him for his involvement in the early workers’ movement in Great Britain. In response, M’Naghten set out to kill the sitting prime minister, Robert Peel.^[6] However, mistaking Peel’s secretary, Edward Drummond, for the government leader, M’Naghten shot and ultimately killed Drummond.

During the trial, M’Naghten pleaded not-guilty due to “moral insanity” in the form of monomania. This tactic worked, and M’Naghten was found not-guilty by reason of insanity.

Outraged, Queen Victoria and the public demanded this case be reviewed. As a result, many questions were posed to all the judges regarding the case and verdict. The responses have become known as the M’Naghten Rules, and serve as the basis for “determining legal insanity throughout many parts of England and the United States to this very day.”

4The Opal, the Lunatic’s Literary Journal

The moral treatment movement started by Pinel in Paris, gave rise to the opportunity for the patients in New York’s Lunatic Asylum Utica, to create their own literary journal, The Opal.

The first issue, in 1850, was only given to members of the asylum; however, the next issues were sold at an asylum fair, so by 1851, the journal was being published in the American Journal of Insanity, the professional forum for that time. At the end of the first year, The Opal had over 900 subscribers and was in circulation with 330 periodicals, and all the profits went into the asylum’s library.

Moral treatment calls for kindness, patience, and recreation. The creation of The Opal demonstrates an essential element to this treatment: preventing sickness and sorrow.^[7] Along with fairs, theatrical shows, debating societies, and lectures, The Opal aroused the mind of the insane away from morbid trains of thoughts and into the rational, orderly, polite facilities of the mind.

The journal was an important outlet for the patients, and it provided them a platform to showcase their own voices. However, The Opal only lasted until 1860, when it to “fell victim to the demise of the moral treatment movement.”

3India’s Insane Asylums

Historically, Great Britain has colonized numerous countries around the world; India was one of them, during the 19th century. As the number of the mentally ill grew in Europe and the United States, so did the numbers in India.

As the asylums began going up, the British Crown initiated the same treatment styles as Pinel and Esquirol for their Indian asylums. Even so, the local British colonials and authorities considered themselves superior to the locals, and they were unwilling to share facilities with them. Letting prejudice and bigotry take hold, the physicians separated the locals from the British. Those deemed “insane” in India were now sent to decrepit, public institutions.

The Superintendent, Surgeon R.F. Hutchinson, MD, of Patna Lunatic Asylum sent a report to the Inspector General, explaining the need for more space, and better sanitary conditions in one of these asylums. He explained that the population was already overcrowded at 138, and the number went up to 151 without larger buildings to accommodate the growing population. Hutchinson also stated that due to the drainage sending everything to low ground, where the Indian people reside, parts of buildings were unusable and unfit for occupation.

In his report, Hutchinson puts it rather bluntly when he states, “this evil cannot, of course, be remedied without either raising the plinth or removing the Asylum bodily to a higher site.”^[8] Hutchinson was one man, struggling to care for his growing population of mentally ill, and instead of sitting back, he did what he could to try and make their life a bit better.

2Phrenology

Many us have seen the pictures with words written all over a human head. Some of us might even have one as a knick-knack; however, none of us will pull it off the shelf and use it to define how a perfect stranger will act. Back in the 19th century, this was a popular study known as Phrenology.

This is the study of the relationships between character and the shape of the skull. Austrian physician, Franz Joseph Gall, a founder of modern neurology, put Phrenology together and held the belief that the shape of the skull influences behavior.^[9] Gall studied mathematicians, coachmen, sculptors, and the like searching for commonalities between the shapes of all their skulls.

However, Gall faced two significant problems with his theory. One, he based his claims on a single happenstance. For example, “cautiousness” was above the ears because he felt a large bump there on a cautious priest. Two, Gall only looked for cases that conformed to his hypothesis and simply ignored those that contradicted him.

Gall was way off when it came to Phrenology and how the brain actually works, yet he still laid the foundations for future neurologists to pick up and better understand the miraculous organ.

1Dorothea Dix

The 19th century brought about insane asylums, increased research, advanced treatments, and new studies of thought. While some of these provided good to those in need; nonetheless, numerous brought more misery to the mentally ill, than they did comfort.

An amazing lady, Dorothea Dix, saw the suffering of those in asylums, poorhouses, and jails, and sought to expose the cruelties of their confinement.^[10] Taking her fight to Boston, Dix found powerful allies, including Rev. William Ellrey Channing, the leader of Unitarianism that sought for social reforms.

In 1841, Dix began traveling around Massachusetts, examining the conditions those with mental illness had to live in. She found them in “cages, closets, cellars, stalls pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.”

By January 1843, Dix took her petition to the state and sought increase funding for these establishments. However, her’s was the only voice seeking sympathy and help for these people. But she did not give up, and eventually, the state passed legislation to expand the state insane asylum in Worcester.

Dix did not stop there. She went on to lobby for the better treatment of the mentally ill in many states. At a time when those deemed “insane” or “mad” were treated worse than animals, Dorothea Dix was their voice, and she fought for them.

Just a person who loves to write

People pine for the good old days, when humans somehow lived better, more fulfilling lives than they do today. The sad fact is that there were never any “good old days.” The only thing that has changed over time is our ability to express compassion for other living beings and the safety measures that we have put in place to help protect lives.

As a whole, we’ve forgotten what life was really like long ago. The 1800s, for example, were dangerous times when disease and lack of education could kill the innocent, the vulnerable, and even the strongest among us. Life was fragile, and death was always right around the corner.

10 Mangled By Machinery

Working in the mills and factories before the age of safety regulations was deadly. Newspapers reported numerous instances of women, children, and men being mangled by exposed machinery.

Most of the accidents could have been prevented with appropriate clothing and safety barriers. For example, a young Wisconsin woman was inspecting the machinery in a flour mill in 1861 when “her clothing came in contact with an upright shaft.” She could not break free, and by the time word got out to shut down the mill, her body was “horribly mangled.”

In a report published in 1892, we learn that a young man was ground to death in a California paste factory. When he began to fix the “dough,” the wheel inside the paste tub spun and caught his hand. He was pulled in between the tub and the grindstone, where he was ground to death.^[1]

9 Strychnine Ale

Strychnine was considered a tonic in the 1800s and was used as such well into the 20th century. It was also added to beer, in small amounts, of course, as a flavoring. However, there were plenty of instances where too much strychnine was used, and the beer drinkers would become sick and sometimes die.

Such was the case in 1880, when two men ordered some beer in Prahran, Victoria, Australia. A bottle of ale was obtained from a store owner, and the men poured it into two glasses. When they took a drink of the stuff, it proved to be too bitter to finish off. Soon afterward, the men began to feel sick and showed signs of strychnine poisoning. They were taken to the hospital, and under good medical care, they survived the poisoning. When the brewer was informed of the incident, he was able to remove all bottles of his ale from the stores, thus preventing any more poisonings from the bad batch.

In 1892, Catherine Waddell of Maryborough, Queensland, was not so fortunate. After drinking a small quantity of very bitter ale, she panicked. She believed she had been poisoned by strychnine and shortly died.

A postmortem examination convinced a doctor that the silly woman had died from fear, and the case might have been dismissed if law enforcement hadn’t collected the bottle of ale. It was found to contain the equivalent of 12 grains of strychnine. A half-grain of strychnine was enough to kill a healthy person, so the deceased woman was not wrong when she announced that she had been poisoned.

Further investigation into her death showed that the bottle had not been properly washed at the brewery and that it must have had the strychnine residue in it when the ale was bottled.^[2]

8 Hydrophobia: Not Real

Hydrophobia and rabies were often used interchangeably during the 1800s, but what is most fascinating about this deadly disease is that there were doctors during this time period who believed that there was no such thing as hydrophobia. For example, in 1897, a paper was read by Dr. Irving C. Rosse before the American Neurological Association, and the doctor “did not hesitate to speak of hydrophobia as a purely imaginary disease, with no more realty to rest upon than . . . witchcraft . . . ”^[3]

In spite of the doubt as to the existence of rabies, cases were being reported in the newspapers, especially when it came to pets and wild animals. By 1899, doctors were publishing articles once again, assuring the public that hydrophobia was indeed a real disease and that it could be spread from animal to animal and animal to man.

It is not known how many people died from rabies simply because so many doctors did not believe that the disease actually existed.

7 Drowning Dogs

An article published in a Wisconsin newspaper in 1876 gave the following description of “healthy” boys in nature:

The boy is a part of Nature. [ . . . ] He uses things roughly and without sentiment. The coolness with which boys will drown dogs or cats, or hang them to trees, or murder young birds, or torture frogs or squirrels, is like Nature’s own mercilessness.

With this attitude, it is little wonder that drowning dogs was a common method for getting rid of abandoned or lost pets.

The local dog catcher of Saint Paul, Minnesota, announced in 1893 that he was no longer going to kill unlicensed dogs with “charcoal gas.” Instead, he was going back to drowning them.^[4] The US wasn’t the only country drowning unwanted dogs. It was reported in 1891 that stray dogs found in South Brisbane would also be drowned.

6 Infanticide

A Melbourne newspaper published an article in 1897 asking what the government could possibly do to stop the growing trend of killing unwanted babies.^[5] Whether it was family members murdering the infants or their lives being taken by the baby farms, something certainly had to be done because the bodies of babies were being discovered at an alarming rate on land and in water.

In 1873, a young boy fishing in Tasmania got his line caught on something. He struggled with it and eventually pulled up a wooden box held together by a bit of chain. When opened, the body of an infant was discovered inside.

Three infants were discovered in New South Wales in 1887 inside a single day. The first body was less than a week old and was wrapped in shirting before being left in the roadway. The second body was that of a five-day-old female, left in a paddock. The third infant was a newborn male, left on a vacant lot. All three of the infants had either string or tape wrapped around their necks to cut off their air supply. Fortunately, the third infant was still struggling to breathe when he was found and was immediately revived and taken to a hospital.

5 The Grinning Death

Lockjaw, more commonly known as tetanus, was not a preventable disease until the early 20th century. Before the invention of the vaccine, people died horrible “grinning deaths” when the tetanus bacteria entered their blood stream. Victims of lockjaw would be overcome with vicious muscle spasms and seizures, until death gave them mercy.

A lockjaw epidemic was reported in the summer of 1899 in New York. Between July 4 and July 22, there were 83 deaths from the disease, caused by “careless handling of fireworks and toy pistols.”^[6] The mortality rates at that time were anywhere from 85 to 90 percent, meaning that anyone who was punctured by contaminated material was highly likely to die.

Doctors were searching for a cure for the disease, but it was with little success. One doctor in Tours, France, reported that “the symptoms of tetanus were relieved immediately by nerve stretching,” but the patient died a few hours after the ordeal.

4 Swallowing Pins

Women kept a large assortment of pins handy in the 19th century. While mending clothes, they would often hold the pins in their mouths, leading to numerous reports of people accidentally swallowing them. For example, in 1897, a 56-year-old housemaid swallowed a brass pin. She was taken to the hospital but died six weeks later after the pin had perforated her intestines.

Children were also victims of pin swallowing, but the subject was treated almost nonchalantly in newspaper reports. For example, in 1881, it was reported that a boy just coughed up a pin he had swallowed six years previously.

In another case, also reported in 1897, an infant swallowed an open brass safety pin. The parents watched over him for the first few days but quickly forgot about the whole thing until six months later, when their boy started coughing. When the baby was picked up, “he coughed up considerable blood, and with it came the long looked for pin. The pin was badly corroded and blackened.”^[7]

3 Carcasses Dumped Into Bay

New York City had a tremendous problem with animal carcasses, as reported in 1870. The New York Rendering Company and other contractors would collect the bodies of cats, dogs, horses, and the remnants left over from the butcher shops and dump them all into the Lower Bay. There were so many dead animals that they were washing up on the shores. Tenants who lived along the Hudson River were getting sick. At any time, up to 15 dead horses could be seen floating, bloated, in the water.

People started to complain about the awful smell and gruesome sights. It was then decided that the carcasses had to be dumped outside the city limits, but they continued to wash up on shore, and “Gothamites who go down the bay for a sail often [had] a very disagreeable experience of dead horse odors after they [returned].”^[8]

2 Gruesome Experiments On People And Animals

There was very little oversight when it came to medical experiments in the 19th century. Both people and animals, either voluntarily or involuntarily, were used in prodecures that we would rightly view as cruel or gruesome by today’s standards.

In 1893 in France, a 45-year-old woman suffered from “a tumor in the frontal bone.” Her doctor had to cut open her skull and remove the tumor. He was then faced with the problem of what to use in place of the original skull bone. As part of a novel experiment, he had a piece of skull bone removed from a living dog and, “taking antiseptic precautions,” fitted it into the woman’s head.

In 1889, there was also a growing experimental trend of injecting people with “matter from certain glands of the lower animals.” This was done to increase vitality in aging people.

Animals were at the mercy of medical doctors. While in some countries, there were laws against certain cruelties to animals, it was still being decided if the laws should apply to doctors.

In one case that went to trial in 1888 in Victoria, Australia, a doctor was experimenting on dogs. He would make an extract from meat and inject it under the dogs’ skin. His goal was to see if dogs could forego ingesting food through the stomach. The dogs were given as much water as they wanted, and the doctor claimed that the dogs were not experiencing any pain.

At the close of the trial, it was decided that although some cruelty had been inflicted on the dogs, the bench could not determine the exact extent of the suffering involved. The doctor was told to register and pay fees to continue his experimentation on animals.^[9]

1 Wearing Items Made Of Human Skin

Wearing gloves or belts made of human skin is something that would make most of us shudder, but it was actually quite common long ago. An article published in 1899 tells us that the skin was taken from the bodies of the poor who were not claimed by friends or relatives when they passed on.

Unclaimed bodies were often handed over to the medical schools, where they were dissected. Medical students would then collect the skin and sell it to tanners and jewelers. There was a high demand for items made of human skin in the United States, and the skin sold for a good price because it was in short supply.

Perhaps one of the more gruesome stories of wearing leather from human skin was published in 1888. A physician living in New South Wales had his shoes made from the skin of Africans. According to him, Africans made the softest and most durable leather.

The man had no ill feelings toward Africans and was a foreign-born US citizen who fought in the Civil War to free African Americans from slavery. In his own words, “I would use a white man’s skin for the same purpose if it were sufficiently thick and if anyone has a desire to wear my epidermis upon his feet after I had drawn my last breath, he has my ante-mortem permission.”^[10]

Elizabeth, a former Pennsylvania native, recently moved to the beautiful state of Massachusetts where she is currently involved in researching early American history. She writes and travels in her spare time.

Most of us are pretty keen on staying out of prison. We have good reason, too. Part of the idea behind imprisonment is to deter criminal offenses. But this wasn’t always the case in Western societies. In the 16th and 17th centuries, a prison existed only as a place to hold offenders before their trial was conducted. Once punishment, be it corporal or capital, was carried out, the prisoner was no longer held. The closest thing to a modern prison was a house of correction, a place to reform beggars and unwed mothers, or a debtors’ prison, a place to keep people until their debts were paid. But in the late 18th century, the prison population of Great Britain exploded.^[1] The Revolutionary War in America cut them off from their prisoner dumping grounds, and it was roughly another decade before Australia’s biggest import became convicts.

During this decade in which the British had to keep their prisoners to themselves, the public began to take notice of the condition of the prison system. In 1777, John Howard took an inventory of prisons and reported that the whole system was a mess. Prisoners were heaped on top of one another regardless of gender, age, or illness. Many died from violent attacks or the rampant spread of disease. Jailers were corrupt. They charged prisoners exorbitant fees while keeping them locked up with no way to make a living. Howard suggested the model that would inform imprisonment during the 19th century, focusing on security, health, separation, and reform.

An outcry for prison reform would drastically shape the establishments of that century toward reforming convicts rather than keeping them locked up indefinitely or physically punishing them. Ideas would be batted back and forth across the pond and would lead to interesting new ways of keeping prisoners. However, the new ways wouldn’t necessarily be less brutal or exploitative than the old. In fact, they would be much, much worse in ways that the 18th-century prisoner could never have imagined.

10 Sanitation

Despite the push to safeguard prisoner health, the squalid conditions persisted long into the Victorian era. Towns and cities were growing at rates that caused huge infrastructure problems in already cramped places like London. The biggest question on everyone’s mind was sanitation as human waste literally filled the streets. The second biggest question on everyone’s mind was how to control the criminal population as they also filled the streets. More people meant more anonymity for criminals, a luxury most were experiencing for the first time. Before the majority of the population started to worry about things like prison reform, they were worried about imprisoning as many criminals as possible as fast as possible. This led, initially, to cramped quarters where prisoners were practically on top of one another with little to no waste removal or clean water.

Outbreaks of typhus ravaged the small holding prisons known as gaols, so thoroughly that it earned the nickname “gaol fever.” A prisoner’s chances of dying doubled when they entered the building. Even though the 19th century brought reform, the prisons built then weren’t much more sanitary. Sing Sing, opened in New York in the 1820s, started off poorly from the very beginning.^[2] Situated in a hollow between the Hudson and a hillside, it was doomed to be damp even when it wasn’t flooding. Prisoners were kept in tiny cells of stale air with a bucket of their own waste in the corner. Worse still, no pipes in the building had a double bend to stop filthy air coming back in, or proper ventilation to let it out. In the winter, when windows were closed, the only air supply came from sewage pipes. Every whiff of air in the place would have been suffused with human filth. Besides being a huge health hazard, it must have been a true olfactory nightmare.

9 Overcrowding

The poor sanitation stemmed directly from the overcrowding in 19th-century prisons. Initially, overpopulation was solved in London by shipping inmates to far-off colonies. But by the 1830s, both Australia and the United States refused to be dumps for Great Britain’s criminals. That was one more thing they didn’t need to worry about while settling new communities and unsettling indigenous peoples. As this form of exile was taken off the table for Great Britain, imprisonment itself was becoming an acceptable form of punishment. As can be imagined, this didn’t help the overcrowding in the least. Ninety new or expanded prisons cropped up between 1842 and 1877.^[3]

Around the mid-Victorian period, two types of prisons had formed. The first was the county and shire gaols, small lockups and houses of correction administered by justices of the peace. The second type of prison was the convict gaol. These were bigger prisons run by the central government in London. They were initially large buildings set into the heart of London but were gradually built more and more near ports. This was because Great Britain had a unique solution to their overcrowding problem that efficiently recycled their earlier system of exile. When prisons on land became too stuffed to fit another inmate, massive decommissioned warships were refitted to house prisoners. They were aptly named “hulks.”

8 Hulks

These huge ships-turned-prisons didn’t disappear when banishing criminals to colonies became impossible. Instead, they evolved into traveling labor camps that operated on much of the same protocol as naval vessels.^[4] Prisoners were not locked in tiny cells but instead were locked in communal decks at night where they slept in hammocks. Inside, they were free to walk around, converse, argue, have sex, and trade illegal goods among themselves. Later on in the operation of many hulks, evening classes where convicts learned to read and write became standard. During the day, the inmates of the warships would be mustered about to bathe, clean the ship, cook, eat, and go ashore to work at the ports. The work would easily qualify as hard labor. Prisoners would unload ships and dredge canals while wearing leg irons.

Given the nightly freedom and the chance to learn new skills, many free men contemplated getting arrested for the opportunity to work on a hulk. Prisoners got three meals a day and sometimes got pay for their work when they were released. However, conditions aboard the ships were not more sanitary than off, and the food was disgusting and monotonous. Breakfast would be toasted bread and a cup of cocoa, and dinner would be 6 ounces of meat with a large helping of bread and potatoes. Fruits and vegetables were rarely part of the plan. The water used to make cocoa and clean off was often pulled up from the Thames, which isn’t exactly known for its sparkling, clean waters. Deaths from cholera and work injuries were common, but officials refused to admit it. The freedom enjoyed by prisoners had its drawbacks as well—being unsupervised in a large deck stuffed with various criminals isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time.

In 1857, the last of the hulks was decommissioned and burned. Originally brought in to help with overcrowding, hulks actually ended up making the problem worse. Many assumed that the hulks would always be there to take on excess prisoners, so jails and prisons on land were often built too small and cramped. Bedford was one prison where the staff had assumed they would always be able to cart local convicts off somewhere. When exile and prison hulks disappeared, the gaol was far too small for the local population.

7 Debt Spirals

Debtors’ prison was a fear somewhere in the mind of every person, poor or wealthy, in the 19th century. These prisons were run for profit and were viewed as an investment by those who built them. Thus, they were run like businesses. Prisoners were given the opportunity to pay for better lodgings and food while working on their debts, but the poorest were forced into damp cells with no windows. These prisoners would often be children or the mentally ill.^[5] Sometimes, entire families would end up in debtors’ prison only to be separated by gender, age, and monetary value. The spread of disease went entirely unchecked, and sanitation was less than a passing daydream. If the debtor was lucky enough to pay back their debts, they would still have to pay off the jailer’s fees.

Yes, being in debtors’ prison meant accruing fees during your stay. On top of paying for better lodging and food if one could, prisoners had to pay even if they couldn’t afford better accommodations. This meant that debtors would be racking up new debts constantly, including the rent on the damp, disease-ridden cells and board for the diet of bread dissolved in water. The jailers weren’t paid by the owner of the jail or the state, so their pay came from fees imposed on the prisoners. This led to a system of corruption in which prisoners were forced to pay for every single service provided, from having food and water delivered to being shackled in irons as punishment. The fees weren’t limited to the debtors’ prison, either. Every prison, gaol, and lockup at the time had a system of fees that ensured the destitute would die in a debtors’ prison.

6 The Separate System

This system came from the United States, where there had been significant debate on the matter of prison reform. There was a prevailing fear that the institutions of society and family were breaking down in the 1820s, which fueled a push toward rehabilitation of convicts. Most thought that criminals were simply lacking in discipline, so the focus shifted to teaching it.^[6] Earlier prison reformers had called for humanitarian efforts to improve the conditions of prisoners. Reformers felt that those efforts had failed to make any change, so harsher methods were needed. The harsher methods that they had in mind were a little like a grown-up time-out. Prisons were reformed so that inmates were forced to sit alone and think about what they’d done.

Proponents of this system felt that criminals had come to their life of crime through wicked influences, so the solution was to limit their influences going forward. Prisoners were isolated from their peers under this system. Other inmates were considered a wicked influence, and officials did their absolute best to limit that influence. Their absolute best was bizarre and dehumanizing. When gathered for exercise, prisoners were forced to wear caps that covered their faces, and they were assigned numbers to replace their names. Prison yards kept long ropes knotted at 4.6-meter (15 ft) intervals. That was how far away from one another they wanted inmates at all times, even when they exercised in silence. The second leg of the separate system was to expose inmates liberally to good influences. In the 19th century, that meant Christianity. Chapel was mandatory, and the only time prisoners were allowed to use their voices was while singing hymns. But even there, inmates weren’t able to sit next to one another. Instead, they were seated in tiny cubicles with a wall between each two inmates. This system, unsurprisingly, led to more than a few cases of insanity, delusions, and suicides.

5 The Silent System

The silent system existed alongside the separate system. Silent system proponents didn’t believe that criminals would be or even could be reformed. Their hope was that prisons could scare potential offenders and scar repeat offenders so much that they would rethink their choices in the future. The assistant director of prisons in the United Kingdom, Sir Edmund du Cane, made a promise to the public that prisoners would get three things during their incarceration: hard bed, hard fare, and hard labor. The usual hammocks prisoners used before were swapped for hard planks of wood with minimal padding, and the food was intentionally bland. Hard labor was the most prominent feature of silent system prisons, and it was mandatory whether or not there was actual work to be done.

The Auburn Prison in New York was a model for the prisons that would adopt this system and eventually became known for its own unique take on it.^[7] The Auburn System, as it was later recognized, involved intentionally breaking a prisoner’s spirit. The sort of striped uniforms you generally only see in costume shops now originated at Auburn as a way to distinguish the prisoners from the guards and humiliate them at the same time. Silence was enforced with a whip, prisoners were marched around in lockstep so that they couldn’t look at each other, and even the prison’s keepers never spoke to prisoners. Instead, they gave orders by tapping their canes on the ground. The work was often considered worse than the whippings. A short day was ten hours, and the work was always monotonous and sometimes even pointless. Eventually, the beatings and whippings were outlawed. The officials at Auburn were quick to replace them with more creative punishments, including ice water showers and tying inmates’ hands to a yoke hung behind the neck.

Auburn was considered wildly successful at the time. The prisoners were well and truly broken by the monotony and silence, so rebellions were few and far between. Prison shops were lucrative, and the profit often covered the upkeep. Prison officials from all over the US and Europe visited to take notes on the system used there. Civilians also flocked to Auburn to observe the silent prison for themselves. The officials quickly started to charge admission fees, which they had to double just to cut down on the number of visitors. This brutal system wasn’t abolished entirely until 1914.

4 The Rotary Prison

The change from keeping prisoners crowded together in larger rooms to keeping every inmate in their own tiny isolation chamber meant that new architecture had to be explored. Early on, in 1791, Jeremy Bentham published plans for the panopticon, a round prison with cells facing inward and a guard tower in the center. It allowed fewer guards to keep an eye on more prisoners at one time, minimizing the chances of escape. Just shy of a century later, the rotary jail was introduced. It was a complete inversion of the panopticon, in that the cells were at the center, and each was shaped like a single slice of a whole pie. As the name “rotary jail” suggests, the cells could be rotated by a hand crank. Only one cell could be opened at a time because the door would need to line up with the opening in the bars. The biggest and most famous of these merry-go-round jails was the Pottawattamie County Squirrel Cage Jail in Council Bluffs, Iowa.^[8]

The Squirrel Cage was the perfect example of a rotary jail in every way. A small town population in a rural, lawless stretch of the US didn’t want to pay for a huge conventional jailhouse that would need to be staffed by several jailers in perpetuity. Instead, they opted for one jailer and a massive 45-ton rotating drum cut up into cells like slices of a layer cake. The town boasted the biggest of the rotary jails, having three levels instead of the usual two. That proved to be one of its biggest problems, and it was the reason that the jail was dubbed a huge failure within the first two years of its existence. The 45-ton drum balanced precariously on a 0.9-meter (3 ft) square base that was itself balanced precariously on the bare soil. Whenever the ground shifted under its massive weight, the entire thing would jam and trap inmates in their cells.

But that wasn’t nearly where the problems with the rotary jail started. The tiny spaces and isolation was still driving inmates insane, but things were even more dire when the jail had to pack people two to a cell. Petty criminals were housed right alongside ax murderers. Being trapped in a tiny, wedge-shaped cell would probably get to anyone, but being literally stuck with a vicious murderer when the drum jammed would easily have been a waking nightmare. Inmates would do anything to get out of the Squirrel Cage. One inmate, Willie Brown, died by eating glass while trying to get a medical transfer to anywhere else. Others stuck their arms or legs through the bars while the rotary jail moved to injure or amputate the limb. Still others reached through the bars in their sleep only to be rudely awakened when the limb was lopped clean off.

With the residents of County Bluffs still reluctant to pay for a proper modern jail, this place existed and ran right up to 1960, when the fire marshal officially shut it down. An inmate had died in a cell, and due to the jammed drum, no one could reach the body for two days. The residents, by the way, still didn’t want to pay for a new jail and just let inmates run free in the building while the jailer watched TV in his office.

3 The Treadmill

Rotary jails were the strange and complicated answer to prisoner isolation and limited resources, but another rotating device would be used to provide never-ending, monotonous work for inmates under the silent system. The treadmill, now better known as the most boring exercise machine in any gym, once put that mind-numbing effect to use for torture.^[9] The first treadmills were huge and resembled a StairMaster more than a running machine. It was invented in England in 1818 as a punishment designed to be just shy of death. Famously, the treadmill almost killed Oscar Wilde. He got out of prison weak and lingered just three years before he died. What made the treadmills of the 19th century so different from our own?

Most notably, the shifts were about six to eight hours long. That’s more than ten times the length of a brisk 30-minute workout. Inmates also didn’t have the luxury of setting their own pace or incline. Each climbed 762 meters (2,500 ft) per hour with no exceptions. That on its own for six to eight hours could have killed, but the prisoners worked the treadmill in pairs. One would climb for two minutes, and then the other would climb while the first rested. Instead of truly resting the prisoners, this seemed to keep them on death’s door without pushing them over the threshold.

The treadmill was initially a literal mill that could grind grain into flour to help support the prison system, but many did nothing at all. This monotony and pointlessness was exactly the aim of the treadmill. Prison guard James Hardie credited the contraption with breaking even the most defiant inmates in New York. He wrote chillingly that it was the machine’s “monotonous steadiness, and not its severity, which constitutes its terror.” Convicts would step off of a shift on the treadmill weakened and vacant, only to go back to their tiny, isolated cells. Despite the glowing reviews from prison staff, American prisons phased the treadmill out in favor of bricklaying, rock-breaking, and cotton-picking. The practice was outlawed in England in 1902 once it was noticed that it was extremely cruel.

2 Picking Oakum

Installing a huge building full of stair-driven mills was pretty expensive. Not every prison could afford to add in a treadmill or a proper shop. But for prisons still looking to make a profit, convicts could be made to pick junk into oakum. “Junk” referred to old ropes coated in waterproof tar that could be teased out into bunches of fiber. The fiber would then be mixed with more tar or even grease to make a waterproofing paste. That paste was used to fill the gaps in the hull of a wooden ship.

Able-bodied prisoners would have to cut ropes into 0.6-meter (2 ft) sections and then beat those lengths with a mallet until the tar broke up. Once the tar was shattered, the junk would often be passed along to inmates who were deemed weaker: the elderly, women, and children.^[10] They would be tasked with breaking the rope up into fibers. First, it would be attached to an iron hook that was held between the thighs. Then, inmates would use an iron nail, a scrap of tin, a knife, or, more often than not, their bare hands to break up the fibers. The ropes had to be uncoiled, unraveled, picked apart, and then shredded. Prisoners quickly learned that fingers made the task go fastest but left them with tar-stained fingers and open, dirty sores. Since oakum had to be traded for food, most opted to suffer the pain rather than starve.

Oakum-picking was often done in a workhouse, so some prison officials felt it allowed for too much socializing. Inmates often sat in rows under the watchful eye of a warder with a whip. There wasn’t much room for socializing already, but the paranoia of prison officials was hard to calm. Many prisons across England would adopt the treadmill regardless of the expense, and picking oakum would be relegated to women and children. The mass switch to treadmills did happen to coincide with the switch to iron ships. Where wooden ships were made of planks with gaps that needed to be sealed, the new metal ships could be welded shut. The demand for oakum plummeted, and prison staff happened to decide at just that moment that stair-climbing was more moral than shredding one’s fingers on old rope.

1 The Crank

Some prison administrations felt that having inmates occupy the same space to work the treadmill or pick oakum was far too much mingling. When they wanted to keep them properly isolated, inmates had to do work alone in their cells. But officials had also noticed something they found very interesting: Inmates hated a pointless task more than a meaningful one. This presented them with an obvious solution: the crank.^[11]

The crank was literally a crank that stuck out of a small wooden box that was usually set on a table or pedestal in the inmate’s cell. Despite its innocuous description, it was a truly soul-crushing monstrosity designed to exhaust inmates mentally and physically. Inside the box was a drum or paddle that turned nothing but sand and rocks. The axle on which the crank turned had a screw, which warders could tighten or loosen depending on how much punishment they wanted to mete out or, possibly, their mood that day. The screw would make the crank easier or harder to turn, and warders who came in to adjust it earned themselves the nickname “screws” for the suffering they brought with them.

A prisoner left in isolation with the crank usually didn’t have to worry about a beating if they just ignored the machine. Instead, they could worry about starvation. Each crank had a counter somewhere on the box that kept up with the number of turns. An inmate had to reach a certain number of turns before they were allowed to do basic things like eat and sleep. Most were expected to make at least 10,000 rotations a day—2,000 for breakfast, 3,000 each for lunch and dinner, and 2,000 more before bed. Some prisons would keep the inmate in the isolated crank cell well into the night if they had not completed the number of turns required, meaning that the inmate would miss supper and get very little sleep. The next day, that prisoner would have to operate the crank again while hungry and exhausted. Ultimately, the crank would be outlawed along with the treadmill, but not before it jellied the brains of many a Victorian prisoner.

Renee is an Atlanta-based graphic designer and writer.