A push for progress on one of the state’s most prestigious medical facilities unearthed, quite literally, a reminder of a dark past. The subject matter brought back to life was one that was often discussed behind closed doors, shielding family secrets or even the stigma and misperception that came with mental illness.
There was once “madness in Mississippi.” And a construction project on the campus of the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson in 2012 reminded the public that there were thousands of people left forgotten in unmarked graves. Their remains reminded us of the history of mental illness, how it was treated in the 1800s and early 1900s, the stigmas that came with the diagnosis. And how we can remember those who lived through the “asylum period,” perhaps forgotten in the madness.
Of the patients from the former Mississippi State Insane Asylum who died at the facility, thousands were buried on the hospital grounds. The discovery of some of those remains would lead to the now active Asylum Hill Project, following an interrupted expansion of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, which is housed at the former state hospital’s site.
But let’s look back at the history of what was once considered a pioneer facility in the field of mental illness. Perhaps its history can give us a glimpse of the daily lives of the Yazooans who called the facility their home in the late 1800s and early 1900s. We know of at least 109 patients from Yazoo County who were buried on the grounds during that time period, whose remains are more than likely among the 7,000 burials accounted for at the site.
The original facility opened about 1855 at the present site of the University of Mississippi Medical Center. It was then known as the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum and was considered “cutting edge” for its time. It was the state’s first institution for the mentally ill.
The facility was welcomed within the medical community with open arms considering the poor treatment the mentally ill endured prior to the eighteenth century. Many of the people were not considered “worthy of public concern.”
“They frequently wandered the streets or were kept locked up by families at home, with the violently psychotic sometimes chained to the floors of jails,” according to Lucius M. Lampton, for the Mississippi Encyclopedia. “Early mental institutions developed not to treat the afflicted but rather to confine them away from the general public.”
The idea of a more scientific and humane approach began to circulate among state leaders in the early nineteenth century, which resulted in the concept of more advanced institutions and hospitals. This idea led to the purchase of land in Jackson and the establishment of the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum.
It was not an easy process, however. Acquiring the funds for the expensive project, legislation struggles and a yellow fever epidemic lead to almost a decade long construction delay.
“An early superintendent later remarked that Mississippi’s asylum was ‘born in debt’ and spent most of its early history ‘begging and borrowing,’” Lampton said.
By 1851 the first buildings of the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum were erected, and a cornerstone placed, and the asylum opened its doors to patients in 1855.
“In its early years the Jackson asylum survived fires, tornadoes, yellow fever epidemics, and shifting Yazoo clay,” Lampton said. “The main building, with six marble columns and a classic front crowned with a cupola, had wing after wing added on, sprawling out like a prehistoric bird. For generations, it provided care for thousands of Mississippi’s mentally ill.”
The facility began admitting African American patients in 1870. During most of the Reconstruction period, the facility held a yearly death rate of about 21 per year. Of the known 109 Yazooans who were buried on the campus, 98 were African Americans.
According to an article by Dr. Sudhakar Madalasira, “The History of Mississippi Psychiatry: A Dark Past Unearthed on UMMC Grounds,” the institute was a self-sustaining community that employed bakers, dairymen, watchmen, firemen, washerwomen, gardeners and engineers.
“Also, by 1890, there were 41 attendants, five cooks, a chaplain and several nurses,” he wrote. “A resident carpenter, paid $120 every three months, also built coffins.”
The institute was renamed the State Hospital for the Insane in 1900. And conditions at the facility began to deteriorate physically with its patient population swelling to 1,350 beds. Lighting was provided by coal oil lamps and candles. Water was available thanks to a local pond, and poor quality often led to disease. And fires were common, with a devastating fire in 1892 that claimed one patient’s life.
According to Madalasira, treatments were both “soothing” yet also “dangerous.”
“Some treatments were soothing and spa-like, but others were dangerous such as chemical acupuncture…” Madalasira wrote. “Chemical shock therapy and insulin coma were also used in difficult patients. Electro-convulsive therapy gained much use in later years. Interestingly, lobotomies were never used at MSLA.”
A more modern, and present, Mississippi State Hospital was opened in Whitfield on March 4, 1935 with a price tag of about $5 million dollars. Madalasira’s article states that it took nine days to move all the patients to the newer facility.
However, from about 1855 until 1935, the original facility housed about 35,000 patients over eight decades. According to a Washington Post article by Ian Shapira, many of them had been institutionalized for depression, schizophrenia or some other mental illness at a time when those afflictions carried a deep stigma.
“Some were sent there against their wishes by their spouses or families; others because they suffered chronic illnesses and their relatives couldn’t support them at their homes,” Shapira wrote. “If they died and their bodies went unclaimed, they were buried on the property.”
Those burials were uncovered in 2012 during the construction project. Cemetery and burial records show that at least 109 Yazooans were among those buried at the site.
Following the discovery of the graves on the hospital’s campus in 2012, Dr. Ralph Didlake, UMMC professor of surgery, vice chancellor for academic affairs and director of the Center for Bioethics and the Medical Humanities, formed the Asylum Hill Research Consortium for scholars and other partners to exhume, study and memorialize those buried on the campus. Those project efforts continue to this day. Current cleaned and indexed remains will be temporarily housed in an archive which is part of the UMMC campus while plans for a suitable memorial are developed.
According to a news article by Gary Pettus with UMC, a permanent memorial could also be in the works. But the recent discovery also reveals the history behind those burials.
“The pine coffins holding the patients were probably built in an asylum workshop,” Pettus wrote. “The pine coffins that held them contracted and expanded over time with the movement of the shifting clay soil. Depending on where a burial was recovered, the condition of the bones varies, from relatively well-preserved to highly-fragmented. The coffins contained few, if any, personal items that might have helped identify those who lay in them. Each of those buried had his or her own coffin and each faced the rising sun.”
