Charlottesville Profs and Pints

Profs and Pints Charlottesville presents: “’Lunacy’ in Virginia History,” on involuntary commitments to psychiatric institutions and what they tell us about life and values in their time, with Alison Bell, professor of anthropology at Washington and Lee University and teacher of a course on the Anthropology of American History.

[All tickets must be purchased online with sales tax and processing fees added, at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/lunacy-in-virginia-history .]

Professor Alison Bell approaches American history as an anthropologist, seeking to understand past culture and behavior as well as what people had believed to be true and why they had acted how they did. In researching her book The Vital Dead: Making Meaning, Identity, and Community through Cemeteries, she encountered the burial plots at the former Western State Lunatic Asylum in Staunton and became curious about what led people to be committed to such institutions.

Since 2019 Professor Alison Bell and her students have analyzed the transcripts of involuntary commitment hearings for 400 Virginians “charged with lunacy” in the late 1800s. Half of the hearings involved White people sent to Western State and half involved Black state residents deemed “colored persons of unsound mind” and sent to Central State Lunatic Asylum in Petersburg. All had been brought before justices of the peace who deposed physicians, neighbors, and family members using a standard questionnaire.

The records of those proceedings offer extraordinary glimpses into the social, cultural, and economic dynamics of postbellum Virginia communities and well as those communities’ beliefs about the causes of mental illness.

On a superficial level, the justices of the peace obtained the accused’s name, place of birth, residence, age, marital status, number of children, and occupation, as well as the value of any property they held.
In probing into what had brought them there, justices asked about specific indications of insanity, supposed cause of the disease, and any disposition to violence. The justices also asked what if any restraints or curative means had been used, whether the accused was “epileptic, paralytic, or addicted to masturbation,” and whether the accused was “noisy, filthy, quarrelsome, or destructive.”

Inconsistencies in treatment abounded. Some people were whisked off to the asylum in short order for having a “vacant abstracted manner” or for mumbling or “talking foolishly,” while some people remained within communities for decades after being deemed “violent lunatics.”

A well-to-do White man was accused of lunacy for preparing and eating his own corn meal while a Black woman was suspected of lunacy for allegedly exhibiting “indifference to her child.” Hypothesized causes of insanity included an “undue amount of religion” and fixation on a deceased husband.

Professor Bell’s discussion of these cases will drive home how much defining “normalcy” has ever been a subjective matter. ( Advance tickets: $13.50. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open for talk attendees at 4:30 pm and the talk starts at 6 pm.)

Image: The site of the former Western State asylum in Staunton, Va. (Photo by Alison Bell.)