I. Summary
“[The] Swiss Sanatorium Society is a fabrication, and its very foundations have compromised its goodness,” Linda De Roche argues in her article explaining the false ideas behind the sanatoriums that the character Nicole Diver, from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night” and Zelda Sayre, Fitzgerald’s wife, experienced during their rehabilitation (De Roche 50). The article makes connections to the false concepts that the public received about the mentioned sanatoriums in Switzerland. Sanatoriums, as researched by De Roche, created an atmosphere for mentally ill patients without subjecting them to mental asylums, which acquired a terrible reputation of pain and treatments that resembled torture. As a result, technological advances produced the “extension of the railway” and a tide of “health tourists” that flooded Switzerland, which “primed [the country] to become the world’s sanatorium” (De Roche 52). The author explains that Switzerland, aided by the industrial age, becomes an ideal residence for people who sought a place that epitomized a healthy atmosphere. People from all over the world may enjoy the health benefits that the Swiss sanatoriums provided; however, only a small group of people could afford these health clinics.
De Roche uses the history of the Swiss sanatorium to explain how it became a tool of financial gain for physicians and a disillusioned haven for patients as illustrated in “Tender Is the Night.” Between the end of the ninetieth and beginning of the twentieth centuries Switzerland experiences two major “cultural developments: the rise of tourism and advances in psychiatry” which aid in the ushering of many tourists seeking a place that promised health, safety, and above all...
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...ntempt for freethinking (holding Nicole mentally hostage) and abuses the trust of the public; Dick Diver and Nicole Diver are the examples used to explore the illusion of the Swiss sanatorium, and how they hinder rather than help, mental healing.
III. Thesis
De Roche explains how sanatoriums in Switzerland became a financial holding for doctors and a mental purgatory for patients; to complete the connection from history to “Tender Is the Night” De Roche should have added the description of Nicole Diver’s treatment and the importance of her family money during her stay at the sanatorium in Zurich.
Work Cited
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender Is the Night. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933. Print.
Blazek, William, and Laura Rattray. Twenty-First Readings of 'Tender Is the Night'.
Liverpool:Liverpool University Press, 2007. 50-66. eBook.
“Hospitals today are growing into mighty edifices in brick, stone, glass and marble. Many of them maintain large staffs, they use the best equipment that science can devise, they utilize the most modern methods in devoting themselves to the noblest purpose of man, that of helping’s one’s stricken brother. But they do all this on a business basis, submitting invoices for services rendered.”
Through segregation, loss of identity, and abuse, Wiesel and the prisoners around him devolve from civilized human beings into savage animals. The yellow stars begin separation from society, followed by ghettos and transports. Nakedness and haircuts, then new names, remove each prisoner’s identity, and physical abuse in the form of malnourishment, night marches, and physical beatings wear down prisoners. By the end of Night, the prisoners are ferocious from the experiences under German rule and, as Avni puts it, “a living dead, unfit for life” (Avni 129). Prisoners not only revert to animal instincts, but experience such mental trauma that normal life with other people may be years away.
...centrates more on the patients daily lives rather then what the asylum does to the women, how she hid the women’s real names, and the fact that her work did not really effect the women’s lives to a great extent. But she nonetheless showed us a world unseen to many. She revealed disturbing practices done at the asylum. Her photos essentially became documents of Ward 81 that no longer exists. Mark’s “intimate glimpse of life in confinement turned out to be affecting,” she changed the way some viewed the mentally ill, and the asylum. And they untimely had an effect of the shutting down of Ward 81 in November of 1977 (Jacobs). Many articles and essays about Ward 81 usually reference Mark’s work as documentary (Fulton). Even though Mark strived for Art, she also left a documentary footprint in history. Ward 81 ultimately must be viewed as both artistic and documentary.
The triage set up for evacuation didn’t give priority to critically diseased patients; instead many were euthanized by the exhausted medical and nursing crew. Unexpectedly, the rescue came to evacuate the entire hospital on the fifth day of the events. Fink ponders the legal consequences of the deadly choice to euthanize patients and the ethical issues surrounding euthanasia in health care setting during large scale disasters.
As medical advances are being made, it makes the treating of diseases easier and easier. Mental hospitals have changed the way the treat a patient’s illness considerably compared to the hospital described in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Until 1851, the first state mental hospital was built and there was only one physician on staff responsible for the medical, moral and physical treatment of each inmate. Who had said "Violent hands shall never be laid on a patient, under any provocation." This improved the treatment of patients but the mentally ill that weren't in this asylum may have
Reich, Warren T. “The Care-Based Ethic of Nazi Medicine and the Moral Importance of What We Care About”. American Journal of Bioethics 1.1 (2001): 64-74. Academic Search Complete. Web. 17 Oct. 2013.
Perhaps the most conspicuous example of the hospital environment’s detrimental impact is Billy Bibbit’s suicide after Nurse Ratched threatens to tell his mother about his night with Candy, the prostitute McMurphy brings onto the ward (Kesey 302-304). While this event can be interpreted as merely a tragedy between a manipulative nurse and an overwrought patient, it can also be interpreted as a representation of the harm that can result from an economy that encourages
Back in the 19th and early 20th centuries, not much was known about how to treat mental illnesses. At the time, many doctors felt that an appropriate way to handle such a thing was something known as the “resting cure,” which called for doing little more than “resting” by oneself. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s epistolary short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the main speaker writes of her reclusive treatment for her own mental illness. Throughout the passage, Gilman criticizes the practice of the resting cure by showing the harmful effects of isolation and the reduction of a person to an infantile state.
The Southern Ohio Lunatic Asylum, a sanatorium in which a melting pot of the state’s criminally insane, daft and demented were housed, was later effectively named the Dayton State Hospital, ultimately named 10 Wilmington Place, which completely “derails” past notions of the previous named building, and has now become a retirement home for the elderly. “It must be remembered that popular thinking at this time had by no means entirely removed from “insanity” its ancient association with demons, spirits sin and similar mythical phenomena. Neither was it generally considered in the category of illness and hence the afflicted were viewed with an admixture of curiosity, shame and guilt” (INSIDE D.S.H 2). The author is conveying that there was a misconception toward the afflicted that they were not only insane but also demonically possessed, hence the obscurity of the patients due to curiosity and shame by the community. In such films as House on Haunted Hill in which certain archaic medical experiments were performed on patients that once were housed there; as a challenge a group of people were offered money to spend the night in a house thought to be haunted by former patients years ago. This movie concept is in accordance with the author’s statement about popular thinking and public views.
The mock prisoners transitioned into inferior subjects who systematically adapted to their new reality. Emotional and physical manifestations were manufactured in the incarcerated subjects, there was even an individual who developed a skin rash due to the emotional trauma (Haney, Banks, Zimbardo, 1973).
As I walked down the corridor I noticed a man lying in a hospital bed with only a television, two dressers, and a single window looking out at nothing cluttering his room. Depression overwhelmed me as I stared at the man laying on his bed, wearing a hospital gown stained by failed attempts to feed himself and watching a television that was not on. The fragments of an existence of a life once active and full of conviction and youth, now laid immovable in a state of unconsciousness. He was unaffected by my presence and remained in his stupor, despondently watching the blank screen. The solitude I felt by merely observing the occupants of the home forced me to recognize the mentality of our culture, out with the old and in with the new.
Involuntary psychiatric treatment is a very serious topic that needs to be thought about seriously. The two psychiatrists that will be analyzed within this paper are Thomas Szasz and Paul Chodoff’s. Both articles begin to deal with the issue of involuntary hospitalization of the mentally ill and show the flaws within the commitment. Thomas Szasz believes that hospitalizing a person for no apparent reasons is wrong, but believes that if they are attempting to hurt themselves that they should be hospitalized. On the other hand, Paul Chodoff believes that the standard set to commit a person involuntarily to a hospital is wrong. He also believes that committing people on this basis of this kind of danger are wrong.
The “moral approach” to treatment of mental illnesses went through many cycles. After World War II during the French Revolution is when psychotherapy and changes to mental health started to advance. The changes in mental illness stemmed from changes in ideas of how hospitals should be ran and the treatment of patients. As stated in our text book by Palmon, Weikel and Borsos (2006) during the 1790s Philippe Pinel started to revolutionize the way his mental hospital was ran in Paris, France. Philippe Pinel’s major adjustments were during the French Revolution, which was a time of inspiration, governmental change and free thinking. This was possibly the motivation and idea shifts which helped change Pinel’s ideas and concern of the approach to
Beginning in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, the nature of punishment began to change. Slowly, the spectacle of justice which accompanied the public executions and torture of the Middle Ages began to recede farther and farther away from the public into the fringes of society as the institution of the prison began to take shape. Hidden by both distance and structure, the large stone/concrete walls and small windows kept the real...