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Chipper words for this morning, via Philebrity:
There's an interesting piece over at The Huffington Post today, which
talks about waterboarding's secret history as a "treatment" for the
insane in the 1800s. As it turns out, much of what we know about the
practice in those days centers around a Philly businessman of the day
named Ebenezer Haskell, who worked in Old City and was institutionalized
numerous times.
And here's an excerpt from Dan Agin's HuffPo entry:
There are many sources that document conditions in 19th century insane
asylums, but one passage in Haskell's little book about a specific
treatment is revealing. In 1867, they called it the spread-eagle cure,
but these days we call it water-boarding. Ebenezer Haskell tells us the
term "spread-eagle cure" was common in his time in "all asylums and
prisons." Note the conflating of asylums and prisons. More than seventy
years after Benjamin Rush pushed through reforms to have mental patients
kept in more humane conditions, asylums were essentially still prisons
for the insane. Recall that Haskell, after each of his escapes from the
Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, was "arrested" and returned to the
asylum.
The spread-eagle cure, common in 1867, reveals a few things about public
attitudes towards madness. The "cure" was no cure at all, simply a
procedure applied to terrorize patients–especially when they were
disorderly. The patient was stripped naked, thrown on the floor on his
back, and then his arms and legs each gripped by one of a team of four
men. The patient's limbs were stretched out to keep him immobilized. A
fifth man, a "doctor" (more often an orderly), would then stand on a
chair or table at the head of the patient and pour a series of buckets
of cold water on the patient's face until the patient nearly drowned.
After the treatment, the patient was returned to his dungeon supposedly
"cured" of all disease, including lunacy.
According to Haskell, the shock of the treatment often caused the death
of the patient. Haskell points out (five generations before our own
current familiarity with this procedure) that if a steady stream of
water seven or eight feet in height falls down directly on the face of a
patient, the water will have the same effect as if the patient was held
under water the same number of feet for the same time, since no one can
breathe when water is falling directly on the nose and mouth. "It is a
shock to the nervous system," Haskell says. He knew it, the other
patients knew it, and the people who managed the asylum knew it. In 19th
century American asylums and prisons, they all knew the spread-eagle
cure as essentially a method of terrorizing lunatics.
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