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Hendersonville Seventh-day Adventist Church, NC

David Wright

Love Came Down

Where are you going to spend Christmas this year?

Is there that family member that you're dreading?

After 3 days, fish and family start to stink?

No, I'm very blessed and have a wonderful family.

And thank you for your help today, that was wonderful.

This picture doesn't exactly look like Christmas cozy to me.

My son Matthew has this little place under a piece of furniture that he's put Christmas trees and a little cabinet and an old car and some lights I think on the tree.

It was the first lunatic asylum for the city of New York, the first municipal mental hospital in the country.

Now we don't really use that word in titles anymore, lunatic, instead we say things more like mentally ill.

Or, But then it was not mentally ill, it was lunatic or deranged or unpredictable or dangerous.

Something had to be done with these people.

And so the city of New York decided to set up the Blackwell Island Asylum, part of a larger complex of city buildings on the island, including 1 that was a prison there on the island.

So you had all of these people there on the island.

Here is, it was supposed to be, as I said, a state of the art facility.

So it was this nice cathedral or whatever you call this, winding staircase.

I think that's a Christmas tree down there at the bottom is what it looks like to me.

And it may have started with noble intentions, but by the early 1800s, New York City had become the largest urban area in the United States.

The population of the city was heavily bolstered by immigration and industrialization, And so as a result, there was a large number of poor and mentally ill people whose care fell to the responsibility of the city.

So they opened what they called state of the art institution in 1839 with the most progressive treatment methods available.

Well, very soon it was anything but state of the art.

Those running it, I don't know if they had so much funding for each individual that was there, exactly how it went.

Maybe they got more for the number of people that they had there, but very quickly, the quality of the place shifted.

Patients were fed rotting and stinking food.

Some were guarded nearly all day long and they had to sit on these benches from 6 in the morning until 8 at night.

No talking, no getting up, no ideas of what's happening around them.

They simply had to sit there in quiet and in silence and receive this type of treatment day after day after day.

This facility was built to accommodate 630 people, but by 1870 it had doubled to 1, 300 people.

As I mentioned, poor diet, just general uncleanliness.

And so this caused outbreaks of sickness and disease and other forms of abuse.

Sadly, over 80% of those that were here were considered immigrants.

Most of which could not speak the language and so they were labeled as insane and sent to this place.

Charles Dickens got to visit this site at 1 point and this is what he said, everything had a lounging listless madhouse air which was very painful.

The moping idiot cowering down with long disheveled hair.

The gibbering maniac with his hideous laugh and pointed finger.

He goes on, the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the glooming picking of the hands and lips and munching of the nails.

They were all there without disguise in naked ugliness and horror.

So where are you going to spend Christmas?

Well all of that changed as again more publicity but it was 1 person in particular, Nellie Bly in 1887.

There was even pages and pictures on different periodicals of the time.

The New York Times ran some things, but when Nellie Bly did something that was unheard of, everything changed.

This young girl at 23 years old, a female reporter, decided to go undercover and pretend that she herself was mentally insane.

Some of you out there could probably pull that off too.

So she goes into this place to see what it's like and listen to what she said.

From the moment I entered into the insane ward on the island, I made no attempt to keep up the assumed role of insanity.

I talked and acted just as I do in ordinary life yet strange to say the more Sanely, I talked and acted the crazier.

I was thought to be by all Can you imagine 23 years old being there on that island Talking and acting in the same way and everybody says boy.

This 1 is really a special case They think they know what's going on.

They must really have it bad After a few days she was ready to go But she couldn't find her way out.

She says, what expecting torture would produce insanity quicker than this treatment?

As she tasted the food, as she had to sit on those cold benches, as she perhaps slept on the floor, she said, you can come into this place sane and very quickly become insane.

I imagine there were days she thought that was exactly what was happening.

The expert physicians, she wrote, take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 a.m.

Do not allow her to talk or move during these hours.

Give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or of its doings.

Give her bad food and harsh treatment and see how long it will take to make her insane.

Finally, after 10 days, Joseph Pulitzer, the 1 who put her on this assignment, was able to contact, I don't know if it was attorneys or what all, to pull her out.

And she reported, and this hit the news, and it was a big story.

Finally something was going to be done about this place.

Her report got the world's attention and she eventually put it in this book, 10 Days in a Madhouse by Nellie Bly.

And as a result of her reporting, several things happened.

1, the city ordered a grand investigation, if you will, into what was going on.

Secondly, the city of New York invested 1 million into the facility.

Put it into my little calculator of what it would be today, that's about 17 million to try and improve what was going on there.

They released immigrant patients who were admitted simply because they could not be understood very badly needed to be done and they fired numerous staff All because this 1 woman was willing to risk what it was like on the inside, to see things firsthand.

1 could say that Jesus entered the world 2000 years ago into again what we could call a madhouse.

Galilee was ruled by a paranoid tyrant who ordered the execution of every child under the age of 2.

Nazareth had such a poor reputation it said, can anything good come out of Nazareth?

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Love Came Down

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