Crownsville State Hospital

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“The child was clean and dressed in a blue snowsuit. She is between 48 months and 6 years of age and is not able to sit up alone. Her left eye has been removed because of congenital cataract. She cried some while she was in the office and demonstrated a gross tremor of the arms."

• Parents, unable to cope with restless offspring with epilepsy or syphilis, dropped off their children there — particularly during the Great Depression, when parents could not afford care for kids with special needs.

• Some came to visit their children. But it was not uncommon for a family to never see a child again, once he or she had been sent to the hospital.

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“When you went to Crownsville, it wasn’t because you were mentally ill,” Phelps says. “It was because you were black.”

• Although many patients were over 65, a 1955 report by the Department of Mental Hygiene reported 35 patients in the nursery and 169 under 16.

• Even as late as 1963, children were being injected with hepatitis.

Crownsville Therapy Room

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“There was a whole rationale about it that they (the patients) could pay back the institution for their stay. They are not going back to the community. They have nothing to lose. That was the thinking.”

• It was common for mentally ill patients to be used for testing after treatments or therapies had been tried out on animals.

• Inside the therapy rooms and surgery suites, 103 patients were subjected to insulin shock treatments for epilepsy, according to the 1948 annual report.

“Most Marylanders perceived the mentally ill simply as an afterthought, outside the realm of their everyday consciousness."

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• Thirty-three lobotomies were performed on what doctors called “the feebleminded.” Fifty-six of the 1,800 patients were injected with malaria. Others were given hydrotherapy — alternate immersion in hot and cold water.

• One common and painful procedure was pneumoencephalography: drilling a hole in the skull and draining fluid from around the brain.
• The fluid was replaced with oxygen or helium so that doctors could better see the brain in X-rays. Patients suffered from headaches and vomiting until the brain naturally restored the fluid.

' Whether due to public fear, ignorance, or just plain apathy, the wants and needs of the mentally ill remained of secondary importance to the state’s citizens and their political leaders. The mentally ill remained figuratively invisible, with their humanity largely unperceived and unacknowledged.”

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• A patient was more likely to die at the hospital than be discharged. In 1929, there were 55 discharges from Crownsville — and 92 deaths.

• Most of the gravestones are marked only with numbers — and the ledger that would have linked those numbers to names has been destroyed.

• Among the dead are stillborn babies conceived by women while they were at the hospital. One was a white woman who committed suicide by jumping in front of a train. One was a man who drowned, while there was another felled by a skull fracture

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• By the middle of the 20th century, the hospital’s staff was a melting pot. After World War II, it was difficult to find male doctors to work at the hospital. Many of the doctors in the 1940s were Jews from Germany or Austria who fled the Holocaust.

• Until 1948, the staff was all white. But by 1959, 45 percent of the staff was African-American and the Crownsville hospital was moving to desegregate faster than other Maryland mental institutions. The first African-American superintendent was appointed in 1964.

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• Efforts by the NAACP and a 1949 expose in The Baltimore Sun, “Maryland’s Shame,” spotlighted the dire conditions at the hospital in mid-20th century. Conditions began to improve dramatically in the mid-1960s.

• In more recent years, Crownsville was a rewarding place to work. Dance and art classes were introduced as therapy

• The state decided to close Crownsville State Hospital in 2004.

Elsie Lacks

• Along with a couple of assistants, Lurz (a local historian) remained in a small office to tend records and field inquiries. There, he was visited by Deborah Lacks, who was searching for an older sister she never knew.

• The mother of the two women was Henrietta Lacks, the African-American source of what modern medicine knows as the immortal HeLa cell line, crucial to medical research.

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• Doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital treated Lacks for cervical cancer in 1950. When she died, they harvested her cells — which continue to reproduce to this day. The HeLa cell line was used by Jonas Salk to test his vaccine for polio.

• With the help of an author writing a book about Henrietta Lacks, Deborah found Lurz and asked for records on her sister, Elsie. He found them, including a photo taken shortly before she died.

• Elsie was dropped off at the Hospital for the Negro Insane when she was only 10 and diagnosed with epilepsy. She died there in 1955 at age 15.