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Judi Lynn

(160,211 posts)
Wed May 23, 2018, 03:53 PM May 2018

Estimated 7,000 bodies may be buried at former asylum


May 23, 2018 by Sarah Mearhoff

Some of the boxes stacked inside anthropologist Molly Zuckerman's laboratory contain full bones—a skull, a jaw, or a leg. Others contain only plastic bags of bone fragments that Zuckerman describes as "grit."

These humble remains are among as many as 7,000 bodies that were buried at Mississippi's former insane asylum, a site that's now on the grounds of the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson. Researchers are planning to exhume the bodies, create a memorial and study them for insight on how mentally ill people and other marginalized populations should be treated today.

"The individuals present this amazing snapshot of life and health and human biology in Mississippi during a really tumultuous time spanning from before the Civil War into Reconstruction and into Jim Crow," said Zuckerman, who operates her lab at Mississippi State University in Starkville. "This can provide a very rich, contextualized, detailed and personal understanding of how health changed throughout time and how people's health was influenced by structural factors such as poverty and racism and marginalization."

The Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum—later renamed the Mississippi State Insane Hospital—operated from 1855 to 1935 and housed up to 35,000 patients from across the state. Patients who died while institutionalized were buried there if relatives didn't claim their bodies.



Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-05-bodies-asylum.html#jCp
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Estimated 7,000 bodies may be buried at former asylum (Original Post) Judi Lynn May 2018 OP
Interesting fact....insane Asylums back then were like the Hotel California dixiegrrrrl May 2018 #1

dixiegrrrrl

(60,010 posts)
1. Interesting fact....insane Asylums back then were like the Hotel California
Thu May 24, 2018, 01:32 AM
May 2018

You can check in but you can never leave.
taht was true until the famous Ala. case of Stickney vs. Wyatt in the early 1970's.

It was very easy to have a troublesome relatives committed, and in the 1800'sin both england and the USA, rich wives were sometimes the victims of greedy and all powerful husbands, locked away forever. Or death, whichever could be arranged.

Thus the large number of people who died while being locked up in such a place.

My grandmother had a brother who left home at age 16, back in the early 1900's. disappeared, no one ever found him, until an enterprising uncle tracked down records, in 1990, to find that the missing brother had entered and later died in our state asylum, in the late 1940's.
Mystery solved, tho still a mystery how/why he had been locked up in the first place. quite possibly Dts may have been involved.

If only bones could talk...
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