Submitted by tomrue on
For 132 years the state psychiatric center in Middletown [photos] has provided care to chronically mentally ill adults. Founded in 1874 as the Middletown State Homeopathic Hospital, in more recent times the facility has been known simply as Middletown State Hospital or Middletown Psychiatric Center.
This week, the hospital will discharge its last patient and close its doors for good.
Today's edition of the Middletown tabloid carried a three page spread, including a large color photo on the cover showing the hospital's Tuckerman Hall with a lone employee leaving the building. These articles by Dianna Cahn, and other items on the history of MPC, are worth reading for anyone interested in the history of psychiatry and particularly of the history of application of principles of holistic medicine in the field of mental health:
- Psychiatric center patients losing their longtime home; and
- Memories from a child raised on the grounds
A digital reprint of a centennial booklet published in 1974, with dozens of photos of the hospital's peak years when it operated like a small city unto itself, is on my website.
Though the booklet gives a founding date of 1874, Middletown & New Jersey Railway Historical Society reports that four years earlier Elisha Pearl Wheeler was appointed trustee of the Homeopathic Hospital for the Insane, the name of which was changed to the Middletown State Homeopathic Hospital when the state assumed control.
A timeline of the progress of homeopathy as a field marks 1874 to 1916 in connection with "Middletown State Hospital, New York, largest of state mental hospitals under homeopathic control."
An article entitled Application of homoeopathic principles in of mental states which appeared in a 1935 edition of The Journal Of American Institute Of Homoeopathy details treatments involving phosphoric acid, which was given together with massage and hot sitz baths at Middltown State Hospital. The article is posted on the website of Homopathe International.
Showing the grounds pretty much as they appear today, I took a number of photos of the campus a couple years ago during a lunchtime walk.