congenitaldisease: Topeka State Hospital, a hospital for the mentally ill and criminally insane, ope
congenitaldisease: Topeka State Hospital, a hospital for the mentally ill and criminally insane, opened in 1872 and is most infamous for it’s heinous abuse of the patients in it’s care. Patients were staved, abused, and even raped, at the hands of those who were suppose to look after them. In the early 1900′s, a newspaper reporter visited the hospital and was appalled. He reported of one patient that was restrained in leather straps for so long that her skin began to grow around the straps. Beginning in 1913, the hospital forced a number patients to be sterilised. Patients with learning disabilities and deformities made up the most of these forced sterilisations, as well as those who behaved badly and those who masturbated. The hospital, which disturbingly had it’s own cemetery with 1,157 unnamed graves, eventually closed in 1997. -- source link