The museum is fine. It's nothing fancy and oddly enough, completely inaccessible to people with…read moredisabilities, and I had to search for a staff member to answer my question about an unlabeled item. But for $5 and a half hour, if you're in the area, fine. Public health is important. Anti vaxxers would hate it but that's their problem.
What I am actually sad about is the tour of the hospital grounds, led by an older white woman who seemed informed enough but whose knowledge of history and psychiatric care, etc, was easily outmatched by the children and adults in our group (because the people taking a 90 minute walking tour of a state hospital are not just curious tourists, we all had a specific interest in the history of health.) She simply did not seem to have any real sympathy or empathy for the poor souls held there against their will, and her cheerful demeanor as she led us around would probably be appropriate at another historic site, but not one where people were locked up for life for the crimes of being poor or disabled. She showed us a picture of a row of fat babies in a crib, admitted it was probably staged as most of the kids would be thinner, but didn't mention the well known fact that the majority of infant inmates there died before their first birthday and that their bodies were sold to be dissected. (http://homenewshere.com/tewksbury_town_crier/article_fade0809-5eb1-5269-a6f3-9fbfcb056845.html
https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/issues/tewksbury-almshouse-investigation/)
To me, a disabled woman, the hospital grounds are a sacred space, a space where thousands upon thousands lived and died and suffered due to the fact that society at the time did not want to deal with them. These attitudes persist today when businesses do not want to make their stores accessible or when schools deny a disabled child needed accommodations. At the time of its opening, Tewksbury hospital was a model for the nation, and today, it has offices for Mass health, the direct model for Obamacare and one of the best public insurance programs in the nation. There is a direct link between yesterday and today, and today, our guide did not even attempt to make it.
A small amount of online research makes the place come alive as it did not during the tour, because you are able to find out the actual names and stories of people - very few stories, unfortunately, but many names. This tour had no stories whatsoever, simply random facts about how at that end of that building, the more 'dangerously violent insane' were kept, and how wonderful the farm worked, and how hard people worked, (until their workshops were forced to shut down because there was a law made saying that people had to be paid. This is said as if it were a bad thing......) It is largely just the pointing out of what population was held in this building that is now used for (some program) or, in about half the case, in this building that no longer exists. (Why in heavens name is there a daycare in the building formerly used as the main asylum for mentally ill men?) It is stories that make people come alive. These people are dead, many not very long ago, and their stories are all gone with them.
The tour is completely inaccessible to people with sensory disabilities. There are many sections of rotting asphalt road, many stops and starts, few near a place you can sit down, also with one exception you don't get close enough to touch the buildings and not many visual descriptions are given even with a blind person in our group. And although the museum uses up to date language - saying, for example, 'people with mental illness' as has been the standard for years - the guide doesn't bother to, because, she ever-cheerfully explains, they just said 'the insane' then, so that's what she does. It's a poor choice of language and it's a poor tour in general. I do hope that other tour guides are better than ours was.
Do go down the road a bit to the cemetery and pay your respects, over 10,000 people are buried there with metal markers that peep up through the leaves. Do think about the lives they led, and the choices that were taken from them as they were locked inside those cells and crowded rooms. Do think about their death and what they mean today to you as a person who maybe benefits from the great public health system of Massachusetts.
