DeJarnette Sanitarium

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From Atlas Obscura: In the 1930s, hundreds of people with mental disabilities committed to the now abandoned DeJarnette Sanitarium were forcibly sterilized and experimented on by the hospital’s eugenicist namesake.

“Though Dr. DeJarnette’s sterilization practices were heinous, they weren’t the worst of his work. He used the inmates in his asylum as guinea pigs in various experiments. These included blood transfusions between patients on opposite ends of the psychiatric spectrum, such as taking blood from a hyperactive patient and injecting it into a depressed one. He also used extreme x-ray exposure as a method of sterilization, which almost certainly would have left its patients with adverse side effects.”

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2 COMMENTS

  1. My alma mater finally got her day at MIA. Wowee! They’ve been talking about tearing it down for years. Auschwitz they make a museum of, DeJarnette a Halloween spook show. This is where my “mental patient” career, in the sense of car wheels, started. You wouldn’t want to make a museum of a state hospital, would you? That’s the rug we sweep all our problems under. Very hush, hush.

    An interesting aspect of this is that Dejarnette sits on land owned by the Frontier Culture Museum, and you’d think that maybe they could make the connection.