LUNATICS

My ancestor Lura Leona Huddleston died in a lunatic asylum. Or, she would have if that term had still been in favor in 1908. Her death certificate reported “exhaustion and chronic insanity” as cause of death, with malnutrition as a contributory cause. Her final address was Nashville’s Central State Hospital for the Insane.

Lura grew up on a farm in Smith County, Tennessee, the oldest of four children. Her father died of consumption when she was 10. Her mother was so ill following his death that, according to legal documents attached to her husband’s will, she relinquished her role as executrix. The nature of her illness was not named.

At 15, Lura buried her mother. Four years later, her only sister died. Her brothers had moved to Nashville, where the older worked as a streetcar conductor. About the time he died, Lura entered Central State Hospital. Then 29 years old, she had never married.

Lura was dead by 40, having spent the last 11 years of her life in an institution designed to care for those with a persistent and recurring and non-specific illness called insanity.

Until such institutions appeared, the care of the mentally ill fell to family members or law enforcement, who removed those wandering the streets to a jail cell. Gradually, our young country recognized the need to provide institutional care for its citizens suffering from chronic mental illness.

The Quakers in Philadelphia were the first to act on that need. In 1817, they established the delicately named Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason. Seven years later, the first such hospital west of the Appalachian Mountains opened in Lexington, Kentucky. It was called The Eastern Lunatic Asylum.

Tennessee followed suit. The state’s first mental hospital was called the Tennessee Lunatic Asylum until social activist Dorothea Dix visited in 1847 and convinced the state legislature to replace the unfit facility. The result was Central State Hospital for the Insane, which opened in 1852.

A new building apparently inspired a new name for the condition of its inmates; the word lunatic fell into disfavor. Curiously, the term endured in legislative language until 2012, when President Obama signed legislation excising the word “lunatic” from federal laws.

Lura Leona Huddleston wasn’t my only ancestor to die at Central State Hospital. In 1918, James Allen Butrum, an illiterate farmer from Allen County, Kentucky, succumbed to enterocolitis (inflammation of the digestive tract) at the Nashville asylum. The chief contributory cause of death was insanity. He was 68.

Although he had been a Central State patient for only a year and three months, James’s mental illness may not have been recent: the 1880 census taker had checked the “insane” box 38 years earlier, when James was a 31-year-old husband and father. Earlier census forms provided a space for the interviewer to note certain conditions — deaf, mute, blind, crippled, bedridden, idiotic, insane — but without the ease of checking a box, no previous or subsequent census taker reported James’s mental state.

Like Lura, James had lost his mother at an early age; he was only six. His father remarried, and the boy grew up in a predominantly female household — stepmother, two sisters, four half-sisters. He married at 25, and he and his wife raised three boys, two of whom met unusual deaths. *

Left a widower at 61, James likely began a decline that led to a bed at Central State Hospital. If it weren’t for that single notation in the 1880 census suggesting a persistent condition, I might attribute my kinsman’s “insanity” to early dementia, a condition today’s mental health specialists still struggle to distinguish from depression, especially in the elderly.

Dementia also could account for the sad fate of a second male ancestor; he died in a Texas insane asylum in 1953. Ridley Dean’s stay in the Wichita Falls State Hospital stretched from his late 60’s to his mid-70’s, suggesting a geriatric disorder. But Ridley’s case is complicated by his history.**

Apparently a brilliant young man, Ridley lost his father when he was eight. His musically gifted mother raised him in Sherman, Texas, and sent him back home to Tennessee to attend law school. The handsome young lawyer married a girl from a prominent ranch family; they moved to Oklahoma with their young children.

There, Ridley shot a man to death and stood trial for murder in 1913. His wife divorced him, and he returned to Sherman to live with his aged mother until, in 1944, he entered the hospital that had once been known as the Northwest Texas Insane Asylum. Records from that time are no longer available; his death certificate shows he died from pneumonia.

As a genealogist, it’s shocking…and a little exciting…to find ancestors who died in a manner or a place that sets them apart. In climbing my family tree, I’ve found those who died in prisoner-of-war camps, in car accidents, as victims of homicide. One died in a fire that “burned him to a crisp.” Several committed suicide.

But stumbling upon an ancestor who died in a lunatic/insane asylum is especially chilling. Other modes of death suggest an impetus — contagion, war, poor judgment, bad luck. Even some of the suicides stem from old age and declining health.

What makes the word “insanity” jump from a century-old death certificate, of course, is the threat of inheritance. Does this explain my grandmother’s fear of the dark? Was this the bloodline that lead to my mother’s periodic depressions? To my anxiety when I try something new?

More commonly, my ancestors died from tuberculosis and typhoid fever; complications from childbirth filled graveyards with young women who share my DNA. Thanks to modern medicine and methods, these ordinary killers no longer fill us with the same dread they once did.

The same can be said of mental illness. We not only have pharmaceuticals and therapies to deal with such disorders, we also have a vocabulary — Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, anxiety, autism, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia — that signals the differences among a myriad of mental states.

Unfortunately, we can’t revisit the past and correct the diagnoses we find on decades-old death certificates. And so, our ancestors who were denizens of lunatic/insane asylums can’t be rescued from the past. We can only honor their experiences by airing their stories…and we should feel no shame in doing so.

*One son died of a subdural hematoma at 83 when he fell on a city street in Indianapolis. An account of the other son’s death is included in my story A Man Called Flossie.

**The full story of Ridley Dean is told in Murder in Muskogee.

Lura Leona Huddleston’s mother, Sarah West, is featured in my story called The Seven Sisters.

[Source used: NIH’s U.S. National Library of Medicine]