Landscape and architecture
Topographical sketch of the State Insane Asyulm, Danvers, Massachusetts, c.1875. The Danvers asylum is near the center of the map laid out like a bird in flight. This design followed the Kirkbride Plan which will be detailed on the architecture page. All around the asylum were forests, lakes, gardens, winding drives, and walking paths. Despite this rural landscape, the asylum abuts a major intersection making the grounds easily accessible.
The architecture and landscape of the physical asylum was central to moral therapy. Physicians believed that a structured environment held the potential to heal insanity by allowing patients to reteach proper thought to their own mind. A great deal of time was spent describing the perfect location and construction of asylums in an attempt to create a utopia for the diseased mind. Many articles in the American Journal of Insanity were devoted to the topic, as were individual publications by physicians. The amount of repetition between these sources indicates that there was a generally accepted form which could be adapted to different physical locations.
Many of these original asylums have been torn down, altered, or left to ruin making a study of their form and situation a process of examining textual evidence rather than the physical object. Blueprints and illustrations abound allowing for the words of physicians to be compared to the real life renderings of their thoughts. Through such study it is possible to see that the world of the asylum tried, and largely succeeded, in matching the written, theoretical treatises of the physicians. Reality did have constraints though and physicians did vary in their realization of the utopian ideal.
Many of these original asylums have been torn down, altered, or left to ruin making a study of their form and situation a process of examining textual evidence rather than the physical object. Blueprints and illustrations abound allowing for the words of physicians to be compared to the real life renderings of their thoughts. Through such study it is possible to see that the world of the asylum tried, and largely succeeded, in matching the written, theoretical treatises of the physicians. Reality did have constraints though and physicians did vary in their realization of the utopian ideal.