“It’s not possible for the mind to conceive or harbor an evil thought or purpose while watching a good baseball contest, except a fleeting desire to kill the umpire, perhaps.”
So wrote Wilber E. Cook in a 1919 letter to a newspaper in his native New York. Cook was then a realtor living in Long Beach, California, but it’s clear he had fond memories of his life in Orange County. His job back then was indeed special: he managed a semi-pro ball club whose home field was a psychiatric hospital.
The Asylum Base Ball Club, or the Asylum Nine, or most simply the Asylums, were the pride of Middletown State Homeopathic Hospital in Middletown, New York. The team’s novelty was matched by their prowess. From 1888 to 1894, the Asylums won 111 games, lost 31 and tied two.
There was nothing odd about being a ball club attached to this-or-that company in the late 1800s. Baseball’s organization was then a confused but exciting array. Two major leagues existed—the National League and the American Association—but the sport’s real spice was in amateur, semi-pro and barnstorming teams, plus an assortment of clubs sponsored by towns and businesses. Not that these finer distinctions really mattered much—a worthwhile matchup was whatever people would pay to see.
Baseball-as-pastime was growing at an industrial pace, but it wasn’t yet massive in the corporate way we know today. Chalk it up to the times, as profound change was typical for the “long nineteenth century”— historian Eric Hobsbawm’s name for the years 1789 to 1914. It was an era of heavy storms across pretty much every front of human existence. One of these torrential sea changes was the American Civil War. In the wake of its carnage, baseball’s popularity went meteoric.
The Middletown State Homeopathic Hospital sprung from another ripple in this larger historical shockwave. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, alternative medicine was having a moment, thanks to an increasing skepticism, both professional and public, of “heroic” methods. Talk about a misleading name: heroic medicine used bloodletting, sweating, and blistering alongside profuse amounts of laxatives and emetics—a real ‘everything must go’ approach more evacuative than epic.
Homeopathy, a German export, had staged itself as mainstream medicine’s gentler arch-rival. Homeopaths proceeded from the belief that “like cures like,” so they eschewed drugs for “remedies,” or extreme dilutions of substances. The rationale is adjacent to vaccinology, where tiny doses of a disease offer the body a class in self-defense. But homeopathic remedies are so furiously diluted that they often end up with none of their supposedly curative matter intact.
Still, New York homeopaths won wider legitimacy in 1856 when their professional society was incorporated by the state’s legislature. The treatment of mental disorders, meanwhile, was being awkwardly shaped into what we know today as psychiatry. Reforms made earlier in the century meant hospitals were replacing traditional asylums. Physicians still dubbed the mentally ill “lunatics,” but they now understood such people as patients in need of care, not deviants to be chained up in the dark—as the private asylums called madhouses had once done.
New York’s homeopaths saw an opportunity. What better way to further legitimize their own discipline than by conquering psychiatry, their neighbor in the periphery? In 1866, they first floated the idea of a state-funded homeopathic asylum. New York met them halfway, matching private donations to fund the hospital’s construction, and in 1874 the Middletown Hospital opened its doors.
In a beautiful place out in the country
With 300 beds—and, at first, only 69 occupants—Middletown Hospital was an institution totally divorced from those earlier dungeons that housed unfortunate brains. It more closely resembled a luxury retreat, an atmosphere echoed by its pastoral surroundings in the Hudson Valley.
The hospital sat on a large enough chunk of land that Middletown residents would take carriage strolls around the grounds. The public was likewise invited to many events the hospital held outside, from concerts and performances to classes and exercise.
This rich lineup of events was all part of the homeopathic commitment to individual treatment. Inside the hospital, staff physicians were instructed to record daily interviews with every single patient. Symptoms both self-reported and observable were chronicled to exhausting completeness. This level of personalized care seems lavish even by today’s standards, but Middletown’s initial patients were not the suffering poor. Like most of homeopathy’s most devoted supporters, they were upper or middle class.
The hospital’s treatment strategy crystallized when 35 year-old Selden Haines Talcott took over as superintendent in 1877. Talcott’s most quoted line might be a prescription of “heat, milk and rest,” but he also deviated from some of his colleagues by using occupational therapy. His idea of “rest” wasn’t inactivity but light labor or “amusement that releases the tension.”
Patients at Middletown might work in the garden, the laundry room, or the boiler house; others cleaned and beautified the wards. Starting in 1890, there was even an in-house newspaper, The Conglomerate, produced by the patients themselves.
The writers weren’t without humor. One headline they penned: “Editors All Crazy, But Every One of Them is Proud of the Fact—Unique Thing in Journalism.”
It was The Conglomerate that recorded the origin story of the Asylum Nine: in 1888, Talcott saw a mix of attendants and patients playing baseball. He already believed in exercises’s health benefits, but something else struck Talcott about this pickup game: the audience. The patients watching were mesmerized.
Could baseball be medicinal? Talcott soon pitched the idea at a staff meeting, and the Asylum Base Ball Club was formed. A diamond was installed on the front lawn, and a pastime inaugurated. Patients would stroll outside to watch games. The bedridden might be wheeled to pavilion windows to watch and cheer, their heads resting on stacked pillows.
A hospital report in 1892 detailed Talcott’s reasoning: “Our medical superintendent claims that baseball as a craze displaces other crazes and helps to relieve the mind of its troubles and delusions.”
Whether that was true or not, it was Wilber Cook who made the Asylums watchable. Described in one SABR article by Bob Mayer as “well over 200 pounds..with [a] walrus mustache,” Cook’s physical frame signaled his effectiveness. He knew well the local talent and pinched from the ball teams that littered the Hudson Valley.
Among these plucked stars was Jack Degnan, the team’s captain, a plumber by trade, and a wannabe politician who later became public safety commissioner. This trifecta points to what ‘athlete’ might mean in the “long nineteenth.” Sport could be but one item in a laundry list of passions and occupations.
Or take Alfred Lawson, who pitched for the Asylums in 1892. He later built airplanes, a utopian philosophy, and an inventive, not-quite-socialist economic initiative called the Direct Credits Society. He wrapped it all together with an amusing level of arrogance:“Lawsonianism” was Lawson’s name for his own philosophy. He also had a track record of leaving people stranded in faraway places without train tickets home.
But Cook’s best find was arguably “Happy” Jack Chesbro, who played his first game with the Asylums on May 17, 1894. The Conglomerate wrote of the 19 year-old’s debut: “He is young and if [he] doesn’t go out with the ‘boys’ too much, will improve.”
And improve he did: in Chesbro’s time with the Asylums, he refined his delivery and added changeups to his repertoire. That was just the beginning for the shoemaker’s son, who played a decade in the MLB and would achieve Hall of Fame status in 1946.
Recruiting such talent required a little creativity in the hospital’s hiring department. Players were often given jobs as non-medical attendants, though it’s unclear exactly what that entailed. Were they used as office help? Muscle, possibly to restrain patients?
Whatever the case, maybe Talcott wanted his boys to retain their edge. Activity was good, but too much was maddening, he wrote: “If in England ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’…here, with our exciting climate and hurried ways of living, it too frequently makes him a lunatic.”
Talcott was a frequent presence in the admiring crowds. During games he would tip $5 to any Asylum who hit a home run. The incentive of a crisp five dollar bill from the boss’ pocket was powerful motivation indeed. Players who didn’t work for the hospital were paid a $5 stipend per game, so one could theoretically double their pay. Fans ate it up and would shout, “Go for the fiver!” when the Asylums were at bat.
Five bucks in 1890 would be approximately $169 today. As Mayer notes: “This was not a drop in the bucket for the good doctor.”
The high costs of healing
Talcott would have more serious worries than pocket change. The hospital’s founding ideals slowly ceded to the unwholesome reality of running a mental institution. First to crack was the basis for individualized healing: the daily patient interviews. As early as 1876, an annual report noted that they were unwieldy, but during Talcott’s tenure, their diagnostic uselessness became blatant. The nature of severe mental illness meant doctors were often recording patients’ lies, exaggerations and delusions at face value.
Worse than untruth was patient agitation—pretty much a given in an institutionalized setting. Agitated patients might harm themselves or others, but homeopathic principles discouraged strong sedatives as a means of control. Before 1880, this pharmacophobia led Middletown to instead use oppressive mechanical restraints like lock straps or “the crib,” a confinement device as terrifying as it sounds.
Talcott toyed with alternatives like padded rooms, taking inspiration from a British hospital that boasted total disuse of restraints. He was later disappointed to learn that said hospital had rather been drugging their patients with “immense quantities of stupefying ale and beer.”
In 1880, Talcott reluctantly concluded that some restraints were necessary, but he phased out the most draconian ones. One of the hospital nurses developed the “protection sheet,” which Talcott prized as a more humane way to tie patients to their beds. The patients didn’t agree. Enough complained that the state’s Commission in Lunacy reprimanded the hospital for the sheet’s excessive use.
Positive press coverage for the Asylums, including an 1891 piece in the New York Times, contrasted the hospital’s slow disintegration on the inside. So Middletown invested in their spectacular Nine, and purchased new equipment and dark blue uniforms.
The Asylums rarely traveled, because away games offered no medical benefits for inpatients. There was no real need to hit the road: the Asylums could bring in $150 on a good day. At 25 cents a seat (the same price as the American Association), this was a profitable turnout, and healthy enough that the hospital usually recouped most costs. Carriage rides from Middletown to the hospital grounds, free entry for women, and season ticket holders further ensured large and lively crowds.
In baseball’s freshly saturated market, financial success went to quality teams with quality opponents, and the Asylums fit that bill. Take their 1892 season, which tallied 22 wins and only two losses—both against the New York Giants. In each game, the Asylums lost by just a single run—a fact all the more impressive considering that the Giants’ roster sported the likes of Buck Ewing, Jim O’Rourke, Amos Rusie and Mickey Welch.
Appropriate given their own marginality, the Asylums squared off with other historical outliers. Most notable were the Cuban Giants, the first professional team of Black ballplayers. They faced the Asylums numerous times, with each contest a close one. The New York Gorhams were another groundbreaking Black team designed to usurp the Cuban Giants’ prominence. When the Gorhams successfully challenged the Asylums in 1891, their supercharged lineup included two Hall of Famers: shortstop Frank Clark and second basemen Sol White. Middletown audiences also got to enjoy the innovative heckling of Gorhams catcher Clarence Williams.
“They want to get ahold of good clubs. This ain’t no good club!” Williams declared as the Gorhams rounded the bases.
Less victorious were the barnstorming Chicago Black Stockings, who lost 36-12 in their 1890 meetup with the Asylums. They did, however, give spectators the rare opportunity to see a coed game; the Black Stockings were an all-women team. An even rarer sight was Asylums outfielder Fish Launt sliding with such force that he knocked over women on base not once but twice.
In 1894, the Asylums played a few games against another asylum-sponsored team, if you can believe it: the Hudson River State Hospital team of Poughkeepsie. Homeopathy won this round: Chesbro relinquished only three base hits in a game that saw the Asylums triumph 11-0.
Striking out
Teams and fans weren’t the only ones flocking to Middletown. Few patients were being discharged, but more kept coming in. In 1895, the hospital treated 1,115 patients—up from 606 in 1890. The plan for daily, sustained attention for every individual went straight out the window.
Ironically, the homeopaths’ drive toward legitimacy contributed to this undoing. Beginning in the 1889, new legislation moved the onus of care for “pauper” patients from municipalities to the state. Since Middletown was a state hospital, most of its new patients came from subpar facilities in nearby counties. These patients became the majority, and they desperately needed good care. But most had no affinity for homeopathy as Middletown’s private residents did.
The hospital’s 1893 report soberly stated: “Overcrowding is a grim monster that strikes its fangs into and holds down every project of hospital reform and improvement.”
The Asylums didn’t last much longer. In 1895, the number of minor leagues jumped from eight to 17, and the Asylums’ stars were simply too good for Orange County. By 1895, crowdpleasers like Chesbro had been traded to other clubs.
Ten years is a serviceable unit of nostalgia, just enough time for something to recede out of and back into popularity. The Asylums’ one-off reunion in 1905 suggests this was true even back then. Cook assembled the crew for an outing against the Cuban X-Giants—a retooled version of the Cuban Giants, their frequent and friendly foes. Talcott had died in 1902, so there were no fivers to be won. But the Asylums did him proud anyway, winning 4-0 for a crowd of 2,000 people.
Talcott would’ve taken no pride in what happened next. In 1910, Middletown State Hospital dropped “homeopathic” from its name, quietly admitting the defeat of its founding principles. It remained open until 2006, but its daily operations were no different from any other mental hospital in the United States.
So orthodoxy won out in the end, as it often does. Talcott’s vision may have failed, but the idea of patient centrality remains an unfulfilled ideal. Within the context of many healthcare systems today, such a concept is a privilege of the elite. Then again, this was also the case in Talcott’s day—precisely one reason why homeopathy failed within the institutional context of Middletown, especially once the hospital was forced to expand beyond bourgeois clientele.
Homeopathy itself has seen an upswing in popularity every now and then, but the long nineteenth remains the apex of its widespread acceptance. Bruce Hood, a psychologist of magical and superstitious thinking, argues that contemporary patients embrace homeopathy because its doctors spend lots of time with them. So that’s remained consistent across the decades.
What hasn’t remained are the original buildings of the Middletown campus. Many were gone by the time of the hospital’s closure, while some of the newer ones have since been repurposed. Like any abandoned building complex, the empty structures now seems to be a popular spot for urbex, or urban exploration. At least one video online indulges an urbex trope by proclaiming the hospital grounds are “haunted.”
“Haunted” is really just a substitute for what abandonment actually suggests: sorrow. It’s certain that Middletown Hospital was not a positive experience for all involved, especially the patients. But it was also a site where a renegade discipline tested the possibility of radical change within an already broken system.
The vines and grasses of Hudson Valley, once trampled underfoot by Happy Jack and crew, were witnesses to this utopian promise. Now these plants crawl through the crumbled hospital, weaving through rooms full of asbestos and mold.