Tragic chapter of Crownsville State Hospital’s legacy

This was life at what became known as Crownsville State Hospital, now a group of buildings boarded up and crumbling on Generals Highway.

Neither the state nor the county seem to want any part of the old asylum. But local historians Paul Lurz and Janice Hayes-Williams are on a mission to keep its story alive.

Missing records and a state bureaucracy intent on closing off patient records haven’t deterred them. They plan to memorialize those who lived most of their lives at the hospital — and those buried in its cemetery.

“I am attempting to save black history,” Lurz says. “We don’t want to see this disappear.”

Lurz came to Crownsville State Hospital in 1964 as a student social worker. He rescued boxes of records before the hospital was abandoned and turned them over to the Maryland State Archives, where he works part-time cataloging records.

Hayes-Williams, a native Annapolitan and descendant of slaves and free blacks, has been on a quest to identify the patients buried on a hill on the former tobacco and willow farm.

At one time, 30 percent of the patients died at the hospital.

What happened at the nation’s third asylum for African-Americans wasn’t unique for the time and isn’t considered an indictment of the people who managed it.

But, at its worst, the hospital’s story testifies to how African-Americans who were sick or mentally ill were abandoned or used for experimental research that modern medical professionals would find repulsive.

“This is history of us,” Hayes-Williams says.

The Hospital for the Negro Insane was commissioned by the General Assembly in 1910, after a report by the Maryland State Lunacy Commission spotlighted the “shame and humiliation among the Negro insane.”

A 556-acre farm was bought by the state and set up as a model of self-sufficiency: Patients built the structures, milked the cows, tended the crops and harvested the willow wood used to make furniture and baskets.

They even cut railroad ties for the spur that brought their families from Baltimore for Sunday visits.

The hospital was established to remove the mentally disturbed and homeless from almshouses, including one at historic London Town.

Parents, unable to cope with restless offspring with epilepsy or syphilis, dropped off their children there — particularly during the Great Depression, when parents couldn’t 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.

A 1938 admission report is remarkable for its brevity:

“This patient was carried into this hospital to be admitted by (staff member).

“The child was clean and dressed in a blue snowsuit. She is between 27 months and 3 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.

“She was carried to the ward as per routine.”

The child may have passed the statues of St. Dymphna, the patron saint of the mentally ill, and Our Lady of Fatima — the Virgin Mary as she appeared to three children in Portugal in 1917.

The whereabouts of these statues are now unknown. One was last seen as a prop in a horror movie, starring a former porn queen, filmed at the old hospital.

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

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.

Doctors also inserted metal probes into patients’ brains to reach the deep temporal nerves.

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

“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.”

George Phelps, the county’s first black deputy sheriff, escorted countless African-Americans from the courthouse, where they had been convicted of serious crimes, to the hospital’s C Building for the criminally insane. Several tried to escape.

Phelps, now 86, says the African-American community knew of the experimental therapy on patients suffering from syphilis and other diseases, but couldn’t do anything about it. Parents would jokingly threaten to take their kids to the hospital if they didn’t behave.

Driven by curiosity, Phelps broke a lock on a building in the 1950s and entered a basement laboratory where he found jars of skulls and parts of women’s bodies. “I saw them with my own eyes, you understand? I was fascinated but disgusted.”

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.

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

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

In the mid-1950s, experimental operations were replaced by anti-psychotic drugs, such as Thorazine and Ritalin. Photos show catatonic patients on floors and benches — docile and ignored. One photo shows schizophrenic patients peering in fear from behind a bench.

In its 1955 annual report, the Department of Mental Hygiene stated “It behooves us to exploit these drugs to the fullest extent.”

Robert Schoeberlein, director of special collections for the Maryland State Archives and a specialist on the history of mental hospitals, cautions, “We have to be careful about judging (doctors) by our awareness of medical treatment today.”

In his 2006 dissertation on early mental health care in Maryland, he stated that in the years of Crownsville’s heyday there was no way to release or cure mentally ill patients:

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

“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.”

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

Hayes-Williams knows all too well about the hospital’s death rate.

After making coffins for their dead, patients carted them to the nearby cemetery. Most of the gravestones are marked only with numbers — and the ledger that would have linked those numbers to names has been destroyed.

For eight years, Hayes-Williams has been combing through death certificates to find those lost names.

No one is sure how many people are buried on the hill, but Hayes-Williams says she and her volunteers have found 1,700 people whose death certificates say they were buried at Crownsville State Hospital.

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.

And there are countless people who had no known relatives to claim their bodies.

The stated causes of death on the certificates are often so broad that Hayes-Williams wonders if they are intended to disguise the real causes.

Many bodies, Hayes-Williams says, were listed as “removed,” which could mean they were released to relatives.

But in 1939, when the Maryland Autopsy Board was created, the death certificates show that significantly fewer bodies were buried at the cemetery and many more were taken to the University of Maryland medical school.

Hayes-Williams says members of the autopsy board confirmed that cadavers were sent to the school for practice, and later unceremoniously incinerated.

In the 1940s, conditions at the hospital deteriorated rapidly. The patient census shows that the population went from a manageable 521 in 1920 to 2,719 in 1955.

Patients were crowded into windowless dorms and given little to eat. They wandered aimlessly or were shackled to chairs and walls because they posed a risk to themselves and others. Many photos, restricted by the Maryland State Archives for privacy reasons, reveal the terrible conditions.

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.

Conscientious objectors to the Korean War — Amish, Mennonites, Jehovah’s Witnesses — satisfied their community service obligation at Crownsville.

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.

But the hospital long remained overcrowded, underfunded and understaffed. Lurz is convinced conditions remained sub-par because of the race of the patients.

“There are records that show superintendents pleading for more money from the legislature,” he says.

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, Lurz says, 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.

Along with a couple of assistants, Lurz 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.

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.

Lurz plays a role in a best-selling book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot. Because Elsie was diagnosed with epilepsy and cerebral palsy, Lurz told Skloot that it is likely she was put through the painful pneumoencephalography procedure.

Deborah Lacks later suffered a fatal heart attack, leaving Lurz to wonder if the discovery of what happened to her sister contributed to her death. Is it better for people to not know the truth?

“You don’t know what you will uncover,” Lurz says.