Portal:Featured Article Of The Week
Featured Article Of The Week
Chicago State Hospital
The old insane department was of brick, with small barred windows, iron doors, and heavy wooden doors outside, with apertures and hinged shutters for passing food. The cells were about seven by eight feet; they were not heated, except by a stove in the corridor, which did not raise the temperature in some of them above freezing point; the cold, however, did not freeze out the vermin with which the beds, walls, and floors were alive. The number of cells in this department was 21, 10 on the lower floor and 11 on the upper floor; many of them contained two beds,
The other buildings were all frame; they were more like barns or barracks-immense areas of bare floors, crowded with cheap iron strap bedsteads. The heating was insufficient; there was no ventilation; the arrangements for bathing were so imperfect, there is no hot water, that during the winter months, the inmates were not bathed; even in summer the number of tubs was too small and they were inconveniently located. There were no halls in these buildings, the entire space is divided into rooms; the stairways were either outside or in the center of the room.
In the report for 1878 it is stated that the Cook County poorhouse: is a rookery and should be torn down." John G. Cochrane, the architect, drew the plans for additional buildings for the infirmary, and the county adopted the designs he submitted on the 22d of September, 1881. Click here for more...
