The overcrowding had resulted in overworked staff and a decreased emphasis on sanitation. Patients were sleeping on the floor and in freezing rooms due to a lack of furniture and heat. To expose the terrible conditions within, the Charleston Gazette attempted to send in a crew to investigate the inner workings of the asylum. Getty Images An old body cooler sits open and abandoned in the basement. Due to an increase in mental health diagnoses and the stigma surrounding the disease, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum found its tranquil facilities overrun, housing almost 500 more patients than they ever imagined. It was, as architect Richard Snowden Andrews had intended it to be, a self-sufficient, state of the art facility, designed to make patients feel at home, well cared for, and restored. The grounds were magnificent and sustainable, including a working farm, dairy, waterworks, gas well, and cemetery. Skilled stonemasons had been brought in from Germany and Ireland to contribute to the architecture that featured wide-open windows, giving patients access to natural light and fresh air.
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It could house 250 patients, each with their own comfortable room. When it opened its doors in 1863, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, renamed the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane, was a model of Thomas Kirkbride’s ideals. Getty Images Medical equipment sits discarded in rooms at the asylum.
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He emphasized the importance of light and fresh air, suggesting that asylums be built as long halls with 12-foot ceilings, plenty of windows, and ventilation that allowed for cross breezes. Shaky as the science behind some of Kirkbride’s medical ideas was, it undeniably led to a more humane and all-around more effective plan of treatment for the residents of his asylums than any other practice of the era.
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Kirkbride built on the foundation established by famous reformer Dorothy Dix, who sought to disabuse people of their misconceptions about mental illness - namely, that it was a shadowy, irreversible condition best treated in darkness with force and physical restraint. The building was the brainchild of Thomas Story Kirkbirde, a doctor and crusader for the mentally ill who founded what would in time become the American Psychiatric Association. The asylum wasn’t always a nightmarish facility - in fact, when it was commissioned in the early 1850s, its conception marked one of the first hopeful developments in centuries for mental patients. The original monument apparently was erected in the 1950's, when there was perhaps just one book written on Holliday, and little other good research available, she said.Getty Images The entryway, which has been restored to its original glory. Hines said it was understandable that the old monument contained misinformation. The back says "Doc Holliday," and in the style of the time lists his age when he died as "36 years, 2 months, 25 days."
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On the front, it bears Holliday's full name (John Henry Holliday), and dates of birth (Aug. The stone is of an obelisk style, four-sided, with a rounded top, and sits on a base. Hines said the new monument is a recycled old headstone more representative of Holliday's time. On Wednesday, the museum and City of Glenwood Springs oversaw the replacement of the monument with a more accurate version. Though these errors are literally set in stone, that is not stopping the museum from setting the record straight. "He just happened to have had a room there." "To our knowledge it was not a sanatorium," Cindy Hines, the director of the Frontier Museum, said of the hotel. And he died at the Hotel Glenwood, before Glenwood Springs even had a sanatorium.