| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Mad Yankees: The Hartford Retreat for the Insane and Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry. By Lawrence B. Goodheart. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. xx, 218 pp. $34.95, ISBN 1-55849-405-7.)

In many respects, from 1824 to 1868 the Hartford Retreat resembled other psychiatric institutions of this period. Its first two superintendents, Eli Todd and Amariah Brigham, saw mental illness as a curable disease, highly responsive to institutional moral therapies. Yet, again like its counterparts, the Hartford Retreat fairly quickly filled with the chronic mentally ill. In part, Lawrence B. Goodheart attributes this phenomenon to the retreat's early dependence on state funding. Unable to get sufficient private donations, its founders had asked the Connecticut legislature for help. In return for minimal state support, they agreed to take indigent patients. As a result, the Hartford Retreat found itself in a difficult position: obligated to care for paupers, some of whom had been sick for years, while still in need of fee-paying wealthy patients reluctant (at best) to share intimate space with their social inferiors.

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