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History
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Woodland Sanatorium at 122 Woodland Street was a highly active and reputable private medical and surgical facility in Hartford. Established in 1890 by Dr. Marcus Morton Johnson, it served a very specific role in the turn-of-the-century medical landscape.
Here is what the historical records show about the sanatorium around 1906:
The Facility and Operations
A Surgical Hub: Unlike many "sanitariums" of the era that focused exclusively on mental health or tuberculosis, Dr. Johnson’s Woodland Sanatorium was widely recognized for advanced surgical care, particularly abdominal surgeries. Dr. Johnson was a trailblazing operating surgeon in Connecticut, boasting a remarkably high recovery rate for complex procedures at the time.
The "Private" Hospital Trend: In 1906, wealthy or prominent patients often preferred private sanatoriums over large public hospitals. At 122 Woodland Street, patients received personalized, high-end post-operative care, rest, and rehabilitation in a quieter, more controlled environment.
National Directories: Medical registers and national publications from 1906 through 1910 (such as Polk’s Medical Register and The World Almanac and Encyclopedia) explicitly list the institution as a premier, state-licensed private sanitarium in Connecticut.
The Location Today
The original site of the sanatorium, 122 Woodland Street, sits directly in the historic Asylum Hill neighborhood. Over the decades, as medical care centralized, this immediate corridor of Woodland Street evolved into the massive Saint Francis Hospital medical campus that anchors the area today.
Insane asylums have a long, unsavory history — but they weren’t originally intended as sites of horror.
The
origins of mental asylums — an antiquated and loaded term that is now
retired from the field of mental health medicine — came from a wave of
reforms that professionals tried to enact in the 19th century.
These
facilities catered to mentally ill people with treatments that were
supposed to be more humane than what was previously available. But
mental health stigmatization coupled with an increase in diagnoses led
to severely overcrowded hospitals and increasingly cruel behavior toward
patients.
These “insane asylums” subsequently turned into
prisons where society’s “undesirable citizens” — the “incurables,”
criminals, and those with disabilities — were put together as a way to
isolate them from the public.
Patients endured horrifying
“treatments” like ice baths, electric shock therapy, purging,
bloodletting, straitjackets, forced drugging, and even lobotomies — all
of which were considered legitimate medical practices at the time. It
wasn’t until the terrifying conditions at these mental health facilities
were revealed through undercover investigations and patient witnesses
that they were brought to light.
Given the severe
overcrowding, patients were no longer given private rooms of their own
and shared a single bedroom with five to six other patients. There were
not enough beds and there was no heating system. Patients deemed unruly
were locked in cages in the open halls, a cruel means to regain order by
the staff while freeing up space in the bedrooms for less troublesome
patients.
Patients at the hospital were locked up, neglected, and lobotomized.
The
staff was vastly outnumbered and overworked, which led to chaos in the
halls as patients roamed free with little supervision. The facilities
were overrun with squalor, the wallpaper was torn, and the furniture was
grimy and dusty. Much like the facilities, the patients were no longer
cared for frequently and sometimes even went without treatment or food.
In
addition to the facility’s declined sanitation and patient care, a new
horror reared its head: an experimental lobotomy laboratory run by
Walter Freeman, the infamous surgeon who was a top proponent of the
controversial practice.
His “ice pick” method involved slipping a
thin pointed rod into the patient’s eye socket and using a hammer to
force it to sever the connective tissue in the brain’s prefrontal
cortex.