An Investigation of the Mississippi Lunatic Asylum as History and Memory

FAIN: RZ-271273-20

University of Mississippi Medical Center (Jackson, MS 39216-4505)
Amy Wiese Forbes (Project Director: December 2019 to present)
Patrick D. Hopkins (Co Project Director: January 2020 to present)
Ralph Didlake (Co Project Director: January 2020 to present)

Preparation of a digital archive and print anthology on the history of the Mississippi Lunatic Asylum (1855-1935) and its role in public memory. (36 months)

An interdisciplinary group of scholars at the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) seeks support from the NEH for a collaborative humanities study of the former site of the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, its patients, and descendant community in historical and social context, and in memory. The study follows from the 2014 discovery of 7,000 burials of Asylum patients beneath the UMMC campus, and extensive public call for information about the institutions. We argue that the Asylum’s place in professional and lay understandings of mental illness, social exclusion and silences in family genealogies, theories and practices of early modern healthcare, populations of public psychiatric institutions, and post-emancipation racial understanding has been understudied or unknown. We are thus requesting NEH funding to support research time and the costs of collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and disseminating information about the Asylum.

Associated Products

"Going To Jackson": the Lunatic Asylum in Faulkner and Welty (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: "Going To Jackson": the Lunatic Asylum in Faulkner and Welty
Author: J.M. Gleason
Abstract: ABSTRACT OF “GOING TO JACKSON: the Mississippi State Hospital in Faulkner and Welty” Since opening its doors in Jackson in 1855, the Mississippi State Hospital has played a powerful role in the public imagination as reflected in The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), The Ponder Heart (1953) and several of Welty’s short stories. As a variation on the southern gothic mansion, the “lunatic asylum” in Faulkner and Welty mocks and mirrors institutions—plantation house, hotel, bank, church, courthouse, the Old Ladies Home, and prison. In sending their protagonists by train to Jackson, the authors question definitions of sanity, the role of the exiled artist, and race relations of the post-bellum south. More particularly, we see how the fate of Welty’s Uncle Daniel Ponder is in part a reply to Faulkner’s Benjy Compson and Darl Bundren. Amid scenes of humor, violence, and sexuality, the historical State Hospital is transformed into a potent symbol of social change and individual conscience. AUTHOR BIO Michael Gleason has been introducing Millsaps undergrads to Homer, Virgil, and Beowulf since 1994. He has published on the Latin of Bede and Alcuin and (with Anne MacMaster) the imagery of the bat in Homer and Joyce, the Circes of Joyce and Welty, and Native Americans in Hawthorne and Faulkner.
Date: 07/21/21
Conference Name: 47th Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at the University of Mississippi on June 21, 2021, “Faulkner, Wright, Welty: A Mississippi Confluence”

Progressive-Era Reforms to Psychiatric Nursing: Scandal, Gender, and Society in the Mississippi State Insane Hospital (Book Section)
Title: Progressive-Era Reforms to Psychiatric Nursing: Scandal, Gender, and Society in the Mississippi State Insane Hospital
Author: Amy W. Forbes
Abstract: This is an article length manuscript that will serve as a chapter in the grant-funded anthology and sample chapter for the University of Mississippi Press, which has indicated interest in publishing the anthology. It is currently under review as a stand-alone article by the Journal of Southern History. The essay examines the scandal that arose from women's new responsibilities at the Asylum and the multiple consequences for mental illness therapeutics.
Year: 2023
Book Title: yet untitled anthology about the MS State Insane Hospital, 1855-1935

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