The New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum (AKA Trenton Asylum)
The New Jersey Lunatic Asylum (later
renamed the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital) was founded on May 15,
1848. It's completion marked the opening of the first mental hospital
in the entire state, and the very first asylum ever constructed
around the Kirkbride plan. The hospital was conceived and built with
some of the most noble intentions to have ever graced a state funded
establishment – Simply to provide the best and most comforting aid
possible to those of society who could not help themselves. That
having been said , there is a phrase that goes “The road to hell is
paved with good intentions.”
The New Jersey Lunatic Asylum was
supposed to usher in a whole new age of psychiatric study, it was to
be an embodiment of the country's enlightened mentality toward those
less fortunate. Instead, just under sixty years after opening, this
asylum had become a hellish prison for the mentally and physically
handicapped patients trapped inside. Today it serves as the setting
for one of the darkest tales in the history of psychiatric medicine,
and it all began when Dr. Henry Cotton became medical director in
1907.
Cotton was a firm believer that the
onset and persistence of mental illness in a person stemmed from
infections within one's body. In order to preserve and restore the
troubled minds of the patients under his care, the doctor and his
staff took to removing the patient's teeth. It was Cotton's belief
that the teeth were the most likely location in a patient’s body to
house infections. However, if symptoms persisted after teeth removal,
additional body parts were systematically removed. The next most
common organs to be removed if tooth extractions failed were the
tonsils and sinus. From there the patient could loose a number of
internal organs, including but not limited to the colon, cervix,
ovaries, gall badder, stomach, spleen, and testicles. Based solely
upon his own research and experimentation, Cotton publicly reported a
wonderful success rate for his patients. The study of infections was
still a new science at the time, and due to his alleged link between
that and mental illness, Cotton garnered much praise in the medical
community both in the United States and Europe.
More gruesome still - The surgeries
Cotton preformed were done in an era before the use of antibiotics,
resulting in a high mortality rate due to postoperative infections.
Many of the patients at Trenton Psychiatric were mentally
handicapped, some quite severely so. Still, the fact that many of the
people who went under Cotton's knife ended up dead some time
thereafter was not lost on the patient populace. This resulted in
patients who became very fearful of surgery, and accounts of patients
who were literally dragged into the operating room in a state of
panic. Eventually Cotton's methods began to draw the attention of
other members in the medical field, members who felt that surgical
procedures did little to help with one's mental state. To those ends,
Dr. Meyer, head of the psychiatric clinic and training institution at
John Hopkin's University was contacted to do an independent overview
of the work occurring at Trenton Psyche. After Dr. Meyer had returned
from a visit to the hospital which left him with concerns about
Cotton's methods and the system by which his work was reviewedMeyer
commissioned a member of his staff, Dr. Phyllis Greenacre, to
critique Cotton's work at the hospital. Dr. Greenacre began her
review in the fall of 1924.
Her initial feelings upon entering the
hospital were unsettling - She remarked about how disturbing it was
that most of the patients at the facility lacked teeth, making speech
and the simple act of eating meals very difficult undertakings for
them to preform, let alone for her to watch. When delving into the
paperwork regarding Cotton's surgical treatments and results, she
found the official records to be impossible to draw results from. Not
only were they poorly documented, they also held many contradictions.
By 1925 interest in the hospital reached the NJ State Senate, which
launched their own investigation into the hospital and the practices
of it's staff.
During this turbulent time Dr. Cotton
became quite ill, with rumors surfacing that he suffered from a
mental breakdown. Regardless, Cotton diagnosed himself as ailing from
several infected teeth. After having them removed Cotton announced
himself as cured, and returned to work at the hospital. Soon
thereafter Cotton opened a private practice in Trenton NJ, which did
very well and made him quite wealthy. During this time Dr. Meyer, who
initiated the critique of Dr. Cotton's methods at Trenton
Psychiatric, instructed Dr. Greenacre to cease her work. Despite her
protest and request to complete her report on Cotton and his
treatments Greenacre was reassigned and her report was left forever
unfinished. The lack of third-party critique now meant that Dr.
Cotton was free to continue his own work uninhibited. This was
reprieve proved short-lived, as Cotton died of a sudden heart-attack
in 1933. Upon his death, the New York Times, as well as numerous
other professional publications in the United States and abroad
heralded his death as a loss of one of society's greatest doctors.
Dr. Cotton's celebrated life work left
hundreds dead and thousands mutilated.
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The gymnasium/auditorium became a storage room long ago.
Electricity still hums in portions of the buildings.
Dr.
Henry Cotton
