Asylum Street
From Worcester Activist wiki
Dogs and cattle were treated better than some of the insane before Dorothea Dix gave the world its conscience.
People meant well, but the fault was due to “ignorance, certain widespread misconceptions of the nature of the disease and the lack of aroused social consciousness,” according to a Dix biographer, Helen E. Marshall.
Worcester was a pioneer in improved treatment of insane. The state built Massachusetts State Lunatic Asylum on Summer street in 1833. Its patients were drawn from state corrective institutions.
It was the first in Massachusetts, if not in the United States; one of the first in the world to apply scientific treatment.
It marked the beginning of an extensive movement toward asylum building in the United States.
The first superintendent was Dr. Samuel B. Woodward, a Yale graduate.
He made the Worcester hospital the country’s model for humane, intelligent and scientific treatment.
His reports, issued in 3000 copies, were widely read in America and aroused favorable comment in Europe. His descriptions of results obtained at Worcester stimulated similar work in other states.
Dr. Woodward stood six feet two and a half inches and weighed 260 pounds. “His person was a rare model of strength and manly beauty. On his brow sat courtesy and command in entire harmony, and it is no exaggeration to say, that his form and carriage were majestic,” wrote Stephen Salisbury.
When Dr. Woodward resigned in 1846 because of ill-health, the trustees credited him with the hospital’s success. They wrote: “We feel that we are bound to bear our unqualified testimony to the justice of your claim to be recognized and remembered as one of the most distinguished benefactors of the Commonwealth.”
The present State Hospital for the Insane, on Belmont street, was opened in 1877.
Asylum street dates from 1876. It runs from Mulberry street west to Summer street.
The core of this article comes from A History of Your City Streets.
