Waterboarding: It’s Not Just for Torture Anymore!

Chipper words for this morning, via Philebrity:

There’s an interesting piece over at The Huffington Post today, which talks about waterboarding’s secret history as a “treatment” for the insane in the 1800s. As it turns out, much of what we know about the practice in those days centers around a Philly businessman of the day named Ebenezer Haskell, who worked in Old City and was institutionalized numerous times.

And here’s an excerpt from Dan Agin’s HuffPo entry:

There are many sources that document conditions in 19th century insane asylums, but one passage in Haskell’s little book about a specific treatment is revealing. In 1867, they called it the spread-eagle cure, but these days we call it water-boarding. Ebenezer Haskell tells us the term “spread-eagle cure” was common in his time in “all asylums and prisons.” Note the conflating of asylums and prisons. More than seventy years after Benjamin Rush pushed through reforms to have mental patients kept in more humane conditions, asylums were essentially still prisons for the insane. Recall that Haskell, after each of his escapes from the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, was “arrested” and returned to the asylum.

The spread-eagle cure, common in 1867, reveals a few things about public attitudes towards madness. The “cure” was no cure at all, simply a procedure applied to terrorize patients–especially when they were disorderly. The patient was stripped naked, thrown on the floor on his back, and then his arms and legs each gripped by one of a team of four men. The patient’s limbs were stretched out to keep him immobilized. A fifth man, a “doctor” (more often an orderly), would then stand on a chair or table at the head of the patient and pour a series of buckets of cold water on the patient’s face until the patient nearly drowned. After the treatment, the patient was returned to his dungeon supposedly “cured” of all disease, including lunacy.

According to Haskell, the shock of the treatment often caused the death of the patient. Haskell points out (five generations before our own current familiarity with this procedure) that if a steady stream of water seven or eight feet in height falls down directly on the face of a patient, the water will have the same effect as if the patient was held under water the same number of feet for the same time, since no one can breathe when water is falling directly on the nose and mouth. “It is a shock to the nervous system,” Haskell says. He knew it, the other patients knew it, and the people who managed the asylum knew it. In 19th century American asylums and prisons, they all knew the spread-eagle cure as essentially a method of terrorizing lunatics.

Proud Moments: Philly Once Led The Charge To Waterboard The Mentally Ill

How It Was: Terror and Water-Boarding the Insane in Philadelphia

liz | 10:18 AM | alternative treatments, hospitals / hospitalization, philadelphia