For the past four years the Community Histories Workshop has been working with the historical records from Dorothea Dix Hospital. Each year has brought new discoveries, which allow us to delve into the history of the development of psychiatry.
In the summer of 2021, the team returned to the North Carolina State Archive reading room following its months long closure due to the pandemic. Among the material we requested were two library boxes of unprocessed Commitment Papers, never before seen by our researchers. It was clear from the beginning what an exciting archival discovery these papers represented.
Prior to this, we knew that each patient entering the asylum was admitted with commitment papers, but we didn’t know what form these papers took, where they might be, or if they had even survived. We now hoped that these papers would give us a better understanding of the forces that led to a person being institutionalized at the asylum.
In the fall semester of 2021, three students, Kayla Glynn, Madina Leon, and Cristina Tejada, from the CHW’s AMST 715 “Asylum in the Archive” class, digitized the commitment papers for 167 people from the years 1856 through 1883. They also created a searchable index for the people whose records they digitized. The index includes the person’s name, date of commitment, gender, county and state of residence, age, race, and whether the patient ended up being committed to the asylum.
Their work uncovered an obscured but largely systematic pattern to the commitment papers, with the same set of questions being recorded. Further investigation revealed that these questions were dictated by the very same 1848 act that created the State Asylum, and were updated again in 1868. The process was standardized even further in the 1899 “act to revise, consolidate and amend the insanity laws of this state.”
The commitment process and lunacy inquisition records only account for a minuscule amount of the scholarship coming out of asylum studies. In part, this can be attributed to the accessibility (or lack of accessibility) of records related to commitment versus traditional asylum records. In some places, such as the United Kingdom, lunacy inquisition records were destroyed in recycling efforts during the World Wars, while in other places, like New Jersey, the records almost didn’t make it to the archive, being marked for disposal in the courthouse basement.[1]
In North Carolina’s case, the two library boxes we first accessed were part of the Dorothea Dix Records Collection, but we soon realized that the lunacy inquisition files also represented a collection of commitment papers. Lunacy inquisition files are stored in the individual county records, rather than with other hospital records. This has meant that it was not immediately apparent that the lunacy inquisition papers were connected to the asylum. In many cases these papers were filed under the “miscellaneous” file of the county records, and the titles varied from county to county.
[1] Moran 424.
