City Insane Asylum Patients
What was the City Insane Asylum?
From 1852 to 1882 New Orleans operated a “Temporary Insane Asylum,” which served as a holding place for patients to be transferred to the State Insane Asylum in Jackson, Louisiana. Patients deemed mentally ill were supposed to be transferred within 10 days to Jackson. As both the temporary and the more permanent asylum were filled beyond capacity the length of stay at the temporary asylum increased. In 1882 the Temporary Insane Asylum closed, but there is a City Insane Asylum Record of Patients from 1882-1884 that details patients at an asylum visited by the City Physician, most of whom are transferred to Jackson as if this facility functioned in a similar way.
The digital transcript of this volume is available, and the normalized version of it is below. Only 2 years of records are available from the City Insane Asylum. Learn more about other asylum and hospital records here.
By reviewing the contents of this register, researchers can learn more about who was committed to the City Insane Asylum, why they were admitted, and what happened to them after their commitment. Researchers should be aware that 19th- and 20th-century definitions of insanity differed markedly from current definitions. Alcoholics, the mentally retarded, or those suffering from various physical disorders were routinely committed to asylums during the period covered by these records.
Gender and Race:
Men were more likely to be sent to the City Insane Asylum than women. Of the 197 patients with a recorded gender, 55% were male, and 45% female.
The 3 most frequently used identifiers for race were Black, “Colored,” and White. There were also 1 each of “Chinaman” and “Negro,” as well as 3 that were not specified. Most of the patients were identified as White: 130 out of 194 racially identified patients. White men were committed at a higher rate than White women, and Black women at a higher rate than Black men.
37% of the 38 Black patients were male, and 63% female.
The 24 “Colored” patients were evenly divided between male and female.
The White patients were 45% male and 55% female.
The “Chinaman” and “Negro” were both identified as male, and of the 3 racially unspecified patients 2 were male, and 1 female.
Age:
Most patients entered the City Insane Asylum between the ages of 20 and 49, with people most likely to be in their 30s at the time of admission.
53 patients were between the ages of 30 and 39. 41 patients were between the ages of 20 and 29, and 39 were between the ages of 30 and 39. The next most populous age group was 50-59 with 21 patients. 60-69 and 70-79 were both tied for 10 patients. There were 9 teenaged patients, and 4 patients between 80 and over 100.
Patients in their teens, twenties fifties and sixties were more likely to be male, but patients 70 and above were most frequently female. Patients in their thirties and forties were almost evenly matched between genders.
From the ages of 10-59 patients were more likely to be White than any other race. Patients in their sixties were equally split between Black and White. Patients 70 and above were more frequently Black than any other race.
Nationality:
The vast majority of patients were from North America (71%). The second most common place of origin was Europe (25%). 3% of patients’ origins were unknown. Central America and Africa each accounted for 1% of patients.
A closer look at the 140 patients from North America reveals 139 were from the United States, and the other 1 was from Mexico.
112 patients were from a specified state, and of those patients, 80 were from Louisiana. 7 were from Virginia, and 5 were from Alabama.
Of the 80 patients from Louisiana, 56 were from New Orleans, 10 were not specified, and the rest were from cities and parishes with only 1 or 2 patients identified
Within New Orleans, 3 patients were specifically identified as coming from Algiers, and 1 from Carrollton. All 4 patients were White males.
Of the 56 total patients from New Orleans, 47 were identified as White, 7 as Colored, and 2 as Black. 16 were female, and 40 were male.
All patients from Europe were listed as White, and of these 50 patients, 22 were from Ireland and 13 from Germany. Irish patients almost twice as likely to be female than male and German patients were more than 3 times likely to be female than male.
Marital Status:
Patients were most frequently single (83); that’s almost half the population of the Asylum. The marital status of 46 patients was not specified, 44 were married, 23 were widowed, and 1 was divorced.
Women were just as likely to be married (25) as they were to be single (24). However men were more than three times more likely to be single (59) than divorced (19). Female patients were almost three times more likely to be widowed (17) than male patients (6).
Patients of unspecified marital status were equally divided between male and female (23 of each).
The one patient listed as divorced was male, but his race was not recorded.
Black patients’ marital status is primarily not specified (40%). The statuses that are recorded are fairly evenly divided between married (24%), Widowed (21%), and Single (16%).
White and Colored patients were primary single (48% of White patients and 50% of Colored patients). 21% of Colored patients were Widowed, and 21% were not specified. 8% of Colored patients were married.
White patients who were not single were married (25%), not specified (19%) or widowed (8%).
Diagnosis:
Patients at the City Insane Asylum were diagnosed with a variety of ailments, often labeled as manias. The most frequent diagnoses were Chronic Mania (41 patients), Stupidity (18 patients), Acute Mania (16 patients), Idiocy (14 patients), and Incoherency (13 patients).
Women were most likely to be diagnosed with Chronic Mania (19), Incoherency and Stupidity (both 8), Dementia (7), and Idiocy (6).
Men were most likely to be diagnosed with Chronic Mania (22), Acute Mania (13), Stupidity (10), Idiocy (8), and Paralytic Insanity (7).
The leading clinical diagnosis of Black patients was Dementia (9), followed closely by Chronic Mania (7) and Religious Mania (5).
The top diagnoses for ‘Colored’ patients were Chronic Mania (5), Stupidity (4), and Idiocy (3).
White patients were most likely to be diagnosed with Chronic Mania (28), Acute Mania (13), and Idiocy (11).
The terms Stupidity and Idiocy were not synonymous, but were apparently levels of a similar diagnosis as one patient was diagnosed with “Stupidity, bordering on Idiocy,” and another as “stupid, bordering on idiocy.”
Patient Assignment:
Most patients were transferred from from the City Insane Asylum to the State Insane Asylum in Jackson, Louisiana. Of the 198 patients listed, all but 21 were sent to Jackson. 15 of the patients who were sent to Jackson also spent time at the Louisiana Retreat in New Orleans.
Women’s Ward, East Louisiana State Hospital, Jackson, La.
Andrew D. Lytle Collection, Mss. 893, 1254, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La.
Patient Mortality:
15 of the patients are identified as having died during or shortly after their stay at the City Insane Asylum. The words ‘dead,’ death,’ or ‘die’ appear in their Patient Description field. One of which took her own life the night before she was scheduled to be transported to Jackson.
There are also some patients whose insanity was apparently brought on by the death of a loved one, but they were not included in this statistic.
Of the 15 patients who were known to have died, 5 were autopsied. 3 were Black men, 1 was a Black woman, and the fifth was a White woman from Ireland.
Notes about methodology:
Before the data could be used for this analysis, it needed to be normalized. For example, under gender m was changed to male and f to female to create uniformity with the entries that were already labeled as male or female. Similarly, blk was changed to Black, col to Colored, and w to White in the race category.
For age, words preceding the number were appended to end of field with a comma: 45, about; 63, over. The first 5 entries list patient’s age and date of entry to facility as well as their current age, their current age in 1882 was used to give idea of age of all patients in facility at a given time, but other ages and dates are saved for researchers in notes field. Entries 6-10 list patient’s age and date of entry to facility, but it was unclear if that was their age at admission or in 1882, so they were left blank. An additional field was created to capture the decade of the patient’s life (were they in their teens, twenties, etc.).
For nativity state, country, and continent were added where determinable. Irish and Mexican were changed to Ireland and Mexico for uniformity with the rest of the entries. Abbreviations were all spelled out to avoid confusion. While question marks after place names were retained in the chart, they were grouped together with the place names without the question mark.
For marital status married (divorced) was changed to married, and widow, widower, and widowed were all grouped together under widowed.
Type of insanity was listed separately for about half of the patients, but was mentioned again in the patient description for almost all of them. The type was copied into that column so that more patients could be analyzed. Cells highlighted yellow in the download to the right were originally left blank. Idiot was changed to Idiocy and Hallucination to Hallucinations as the later form of these names were used more frequently. Diagnoses listed as ‘with’ a second diagnosis were retained in the type column, but diagnoses ’caused’ by something only retained the diagnosis and not the cause, however, the cause is still listed in the patient description. These decisions were made by looking at how the original records listed types of insanity.
Finally, for all categories the distinction between unknown and not specified is that unknown demarcates information that the recorder could not ascertain, but not specified means that it was not recorded. Both are grouped together in this analysis because they are unknown to the researcher, but they are listed separately in the data. Notes with a ‘? [sic]’ were added by the transcriber to indicate uncertainty; notes marked with an asterisk describe the original text, such as a word that was crossed out or underlined. The exact detail is usually described at the end of the patient information entry.
Learn More:
“Disability History Glossary.” Historic England. Accessed January 19, 2024. https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/disability-history/about-the-project/glossary.
GROB, GERALD N. “Class, Ethnicity, and Race in American Mental Hospitals, 1830–75.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 28, no. 3 (1973): 207–29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24623005.
(Available online with a JSTOR account.)
Vandal, Gilles. “Curing the Insane in New Orleans: The Failure of the “Temporary Insane Asylum,” 1852-1882.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 46, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 155-184. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4234105.
(Available in print at City Archives and Special Collections or online with a JSTOR account.)
Wells, Fred Allison. “The evolution and nature of mental health laws in the state of Louisiana,” 1966.
(Available on 1 reel of microfilm, call number UM 67-3858)
Future Research:
Additional research could look at the general population statistics of the City of the New Orleans as compared to this facility. These records could also be compared with statistics for the patients at Jackson. The Temporary Insane Asylum operated at a different time from the City Insane Asylum, so the change in patients over time could also be worth reviewing, especially for differences before and after the Civil War.