| Description |
- Background
The state hospital at Goldsboro opened in 1880 as North Carolina’s first institution to serve the Black mentally ill, and was the second such institution to open in the American South. And while there is a growing historiography on asylums in the American South, this particular institution has received limited scrutiny.
Methods
Using unexplored and under-utilized sources including state Eugenics Board meeting notes, medical superintendent journals, hospital reports and correspondence, and newspapers, this study compares diagnostic and management practices at Goldsboro to its white counterparts in North Carolina.
Results
Consistent with prior scholarship on Southern asylums, notions of a primitive, excitable Black mentality suited to unskilled labor predisposed patients to diagnoses of mania. These racialized notions of psychiatry, coupled with inadequate funding, bolstered the growth of enforced hospital labor, including the development of patient cotton-picking for hire. In addition, sterilizations were conducted as a form of behavioral control and were utilized disproportionately among Black male patients.
Conclusions
Taken together, these findings reveal a hospital entrenched in the enduring legacies of slavery, constructing a system in which patients were subjugated to sustain the institution that confined them. Goldsboro’s history reveals strong parallels to modern-day incarceration, thus exposing common threads throughout our histories of confinement. Overall, these results reinforce the necessity of continued scholarship to expose the early histories of racism in psychiatry and the ways they may influence institutions today.
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