What happend with this buildings?
This was Project of the building
How it locked
History of Queen Street Site. Architect John Howard's "Provincial Lunatic Asylum"
as it would have appeared in the 19th Century. 1001 Queen Street West
has been home to a mental health facility for 150 years. On January 26,
1850, the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, as it was then known, first opened its doors.
Here is the official cronology"
1846: Construction begins for the first ‘Provincial Lunatic
Asylum’ on a 50 acre portion of the Garrison Reserve (Military
property). The architect was John George Howard. 1851: The Toronto architecture firm of Cumberland and Ridout is engaged to design a wall with lodges and an entrance gate around the asylum.
1889: Two new brick workshop buildings (extant) are constructed for use by staff and patients.
1964: The Ministry of Health announces plans to replace the Queen Street asylum structures with new buildings on the same site.
1970: Construction of new units begins.
What happend in 1850 that there were so many mental patients ? Did we loose some historical information ?
Medical director Joseph Workman believed that 50 per cent of his alleged
“lunacy” cases were curable at home. But with this half-built facility
so close at hand, local officials found it a convenient place to drop
off their criminals and misfits.
The new hospital was situated well outside the city, in a large open
area on the lake shore. It was intended to be a sanctuary, a safe place,
for persons who were suffering. Inmates were to be treated as patients,
there to be cured in an atmosphere of cleanliness, kindness, decency
and compassion. The impressions of Susanna Moodie, visiting Toronto in
the autumn of 1852, well captured the new attitude:
Toronto Globe editor George Brown wrote of the new Provincial
Lunatic Asylum in 1850. He optimistically viewed it as a true asylum,
“where disturbing influences are absent—not a mere hospital or
prison—where every good part of human nature is brought into play.”
Within a few short years, however, Brown’s attitudes radically
altered. An old political adversary, Dr. Joseph Workman, was named head
of the institution.
Brown soon became a harsh critic, most severely in
February, 1857, when the Globe published an attack on the moral
character and medical competence of the Medical Superintendent. Dr.
Workman was guilty of “villainy, deceit, and tyranny,” wrote a
disgruntled former hospital porter, James Magar. Calling himself “the
moral Sentinel of the Asylum,” his letter was headlined by the Globe, “Recent
Disgraceful and Outrageous Doings at the Provincial Lunatic Asylum.”
Magar outlined a number of alleged incidents of sexual misconduct,
inadequate security, physical harassment, and administrative
mismanagement.
Joseph Workman a phisician that worked therehad the following impression about the hospital
“Nothing,” he once wrote, “has so largely contributed to the filling of
this asylum with incurables, as the almost astonishing ignorance of the
medical profession, on the true nature, & the proper treatment of
insanity.” One of his reports attacked the maltreatment of the mentally
ill with “active and depressing therapeutic measures,” including,
“bloodletting, purging, vomiting, salivation, blistering, cupping,
setons, low diet, and the whole battery of medical destructives.”
An evil of inconceivable magnitude … in the
working and present condition of this Institution has been the
introduction into it, of criminal Lunatics from the Provincial
Penitentiary, and the County Jails. It is an outrage against public
benevolence, and an indignity to human affliction, to cast into the same
house of refuge with the harmless, feeble, kind-hearted and truthful
victims of ordinary insanity, those moral monsters … or, yet worse,
those villains who affect insanity by means of evading the just
punishment of the most atrocious crimes.
Grief; Love; Loss of Property; Religious
Excitement; Religious Despair; Family Quarrels; Jealousy; Fright;
Disappointed Affections; Excessive Study; Reading and Fasting;
Intemperance; Breach of Promise of Marriage; Suppression of Menses;
Slander; Want of Employment; Marriage; Miscarriage, and bad treatment;
Spirit Rapping; Death of Child; Death of Husband; Death of Wife;
Business Difficulties; Political Excitement; Disputed Boundary; Strong
Tea; Eclipse of the Sun; Religious Controversy; Inhalation of Nitrous
Oxide Gas; Reading Religious Books; Tobacco; Remorse of Conscience,
&c., &c.
Despite its name, Provincial Lunatic Asylum, the hospital was not a safe
place separate from the world. Its creation and its administration were
inevitably involved in the political machinations of the time. Since it
spent public money—a great deal of public money—it was always subject
to public scrutiny, especially by journalist/politicians like George
Brown. Since it hired many public employees, it was ever subject to
accusations of patronage—in those days patronage politics touched every
provincially administered institution. Brown had taken an interest in it
long before it opened.
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