- two cruisers's Rating
-
4
- Photos
Red bus to the Palace Stop. Blue bus to the Museum Stop. That’s how easy it is to get to three museums included in the price of the Colonial Williamsburg entrance ticket. We arrived at the Public Hospital a few minutes before it opened. That gave us time to admire the huge magnolia tree on the lawn at the corner of Francis and South Henry Streets. I had seen magnolias in bloom before with their big showing white blooms and deep dark green leaves. In the fall the trees are covered with huge clusters of red berries attached to a cone-like pod. It was almost as beautiful as the white blooms.
Inside the Public Hospital of 1773 we had to put our carry-bags and water bottles in a locker. Then we were permitted entry into the hospital museum and after that we could take the elevator to a lower level where we walked a wide corridor with gift shop to the side toward the museum café and the elevators that would take us to the other two museums (Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum and the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum).
This was the first public institution for the mentally ill built in colonial America. Known in 1773 by the politically incorrect name of "Hospital for Lunaticks", it went through several revisions of use during the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. It also burned down and has just recently been reconstructed. We saw two rooms that represented the way patients were housed in 1773 and 1845. The earlier version was more like a prison cell, the later version looked to be more humane. While we looked in the cells we listened to the words of patients who might have lived there. There were displays of implements used to treat the patients. One looked like a coffin with wire mesh sides used to confine particularly violent ones.