Eldritch Institutions: The Birth of American Asylums, the Founding of Butler Hospital, and a Confrontation with Lovecraft.

Insanity and mental maladies have become common tropes within Lovecraftian fiction. Even more omnipresent in these works are cursed locations such as hexed boarding houses and carceral psychiatric asylums where protagonists often end their stories. Yet, the portrayal of asylums in this genre stem from the radically changing and opaque nature of psychiatric institutions and theories that Lovecraft witnessed throughout his life as well as his parents’ own hospitalization within Butler Hospital. This paper will focus on the radically evolving psychiatric theories of the 19th and early 20th century while using Lovecraft’s familial experiences with Butler Hospital as a centering point. A brief history of the field of psychiatry, including supernatural theories as well as the carceral nature of early asylums, will be given up to the founding of Butler Hospital in 1844. Butler Hospital will be used as an example of an initially progressive psychiatric hospital that eventually adopted the standards of care common in the early 1900s American mental healthcare system. Special focus will be placed on the supposedly therapeutic structural design of psychiatric hospitals at the time utilizing the ideas of Luther Bell and Isacc Ray, Butler Hospital’s first superintendent, as an example. Standard practices and procedures at the time of Winfield Scott Lovecraft’s and Sarah Susan Lovecraft’s hospitalizations will be showcased. Speculations on the effects of their treatment and death will be presented as they relate to Lovecraft’s fear of doctors and his writings. Topics that will be addressed include comparative models of 19th and 20th century psychopathology, the founding and transformation of Butler Hospital in the 19th to early 20th century, and the effects on Lovecraft’s life and writings as a result of his parents’ hospitalizations and deaths at Butler Hospital.