The Dark Story of Stockton Asylum — Inside California's Oldest Asylum
Quiet Wards
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The Dark Story of Stockton Asylum — Inside California's Oldest Asylum
🔔 Subscribe For more interesting deep dives in these wicked Asylums. @quiet-wards
In eighteen forty-nine, California had no asylum, no penitentiary, and one log jail so weak a prisoner once carried the door away on his back. So San Francisco bought a boat and filled it with anyone found wandering the streets at night. Four years later the state moved those people ninety miles inland to Stockton, and the Insane Asylum of California opened its doors on land chosen for its easy access to the goldfields. You have probably heard that Stockton State Hospital was built for gold miners driven mad by the Rush. That story is the first two years of a hundred and forty-five, and the state's own records tell a very different one. This is the full documented history of California's oldest asylum: the eighteen sixty-one rulebook that promised no attendant would ever raise a voice, the two hundred and forty-five lobotomies performed between nineteen forty-seven and nineteen fifty-four, and the four thousand patients left in the care of eleven doctors.
We follow the record from the prison brig Euphemia to the eugenic sterilization program that made Stockton the state's early leader, through the duel fought by two of its own physicians, the reporter who had himself committed in eighteen eighty-eight, and the first woman ever to run the place. We name what the archives contain and we say plainly where the record goes silent, including the missing census years, the vanished patient names, and the Medal of Honor sailor buried in the asylum's ground for reasons nobody wrote down. Then we deal with the bodies. In two thousand five a crew digging a wastewater pit on the site brought up coffins and square headed nails, and the numbers that came out of it do not add up the way the internet says they do. The truth is not a mass grave. It is something quieter, and worse. Stockton State Hospital, California mental asylum history, abandoned asylums, lobotomy history, forced sterilization, eugenics in America, Stockton Developmental Center, unmarked graves, dark history documentary.
Articles and sources used for research:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27527...
https://www.academia.edu/71804772/The...
https://ohp.parks.ca.gov/ListedResour...
https://www.lodinews.com/news/article...
1 Comments
The Dark Story of Stockton Asylum — Inside California's Oldest Asylum
Quiet Wards
2,685 views
The Dark Story of Stockton Asylum — Inside California's Oldest Asylum
🔔 Subscribe For more interesting deep dives in these wicked Asylums. @quiet-wards
In eighteen forty-nine, California had no asylum, no penitentiary, and one log jail so weak a prisoner once carried the door away on his back. So San Francisco bought a boat and filled it with anyone found wandering the streets at night. Four years later the state moved those people ninety miles inland to Stockton, and the Insane Asylum of California opened its doors on land chosen for its easy access to the goldfields. You have probably heard that Stockton State Hospital was built for gold miners driven mad by the Rush. That story is the first two years of a hundred and forty-five, and the state's own records tell a very different one. This is the full documented history of California's oldest asylum: the eighteen sixty-one rulebook that promised no attendant would ever raise a voice, the two hundred and forty-five lobotomies performed between nineteen forty-seven and nineteen fifty-four, and the four thousand patients left in the care of eleven doctors.
We follow the record from the prison brig Euphemia to the eugenic sterilization program that made Stockton the state's early leader, through the duel fought by two of its own physicians, the reporter who had himself committed in eighteen eighty-eight, and the first woman ever to run the place. We name what the archives contain and we say plainly where the record goes silent, including the missing census years, the vanished patient names, and the Medal of Honor sailor buried in the asylum's ground for reasons nobody wrote down. Then we deal with the bodies. In two thousand five a crew digging a wastewater pit on the site brought up coffins and square headed nails, and the numbers that came out of it do not add up the way the internet says they do. The truth is not a mass grave. It is something quieter, and worse. Stockton State Hospital, California mental asylum history, abandoned asylums, lobotomy history, forced sterilization, eugenics in America, Stockton Developmental Center, unmarked graves, dark history documentary.
Articles and sources used for research:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27527...
https://www.academia.edu/71804772/The...
https://ohp.parks.ca.gov/ListedResour...
https://www.lodinews.com/news/article...