Difference between revisions of "Portal:Featured Article Of The Week"

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|Title= U.S. Narcotics Farm
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|Title= Callan Park Hospital for the Insane
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|Body= For nearly four decades, from the 1930s to the '70s, Lexington was a center for drug research and treatment. It drew addicts talented and desperate, obscure and celebrated, and provided free treatment and more: job training, sports, dental help, music lessons, even manicures. Research done there, much of it conducted with volunteer human subjects, yielded insights into drug addiction that still resonate today.
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|Body= The Colonial Government bought the whole 104.5 acres as a site for a new lunatic asylum to be designed according to the enlightened views of the American Dr Thomas Kirkbride. Colonial Architect James Barnett worked in collaboration with Inspector of the Insane Dr Frederick Norton Manning to produce a group of some twenty neo-classical buildings, completed in 1885 and subsequently named the Kirkbride Block, offering progressive patient care.
  
Jazz greats Chet Baker and Elvin Jones took the Lexington Cure. So did William S. Burroughs and his son, both of whom wrote about it. The father described the grueling detox but opined that the food was excellent. The son wrote about the place's isolation, and the joys of landing an easy job on-site.
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The asylum was the 'institutional linchpin' of moral therapy and the appropriate design of the building was crucial to the success of the therapy. [18] Pleasant surroundings and well designed, comfortable, small-scale buildings were imperative. These aims were embodied in a pavilion-type layout, where small buildings had all-weather connections and the spaces in between were landscaped as courtyards for outdoor activities. Manning chose Chartham Down because it was a pavilion-type layout in which separate ward blocks enclosed airing courts. Ultimately, the combination of Manning's understanding of moral therapy, Barnet's architecture, and the outstanding site at Callan Park, produced a design of a higher standard than Chartham.
  
A 1930s New Deal era project, Narco was a joint venture of the Public Health Service and the Bureau of Prisons. The notion that thorny problems are best solved by a centralized bureaucracy is a concept that has seen happier days, but Narco's founders were sure that government, fueled by money and manpower, could change a nation's social landscape — from Lexington and a facility in Fort Worth Texas, that opened in 1938.
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Together they designed five male and five female wards, to accommodate approximately 600 patients. The wards were symmetrically arranged about the main cross axis on which the official buildings were planned. Eight of the lofty, airy wards, had large airing courts – some with a view to the Blue Mountains. The other two had high retaining walls caused by the slope of the land. A remarkable continuous covered veranda linked the buildings. [[Callan Park Hospital for the Insane|Click here for more...]]
 
 
Lexington's countryside setting was important because this was a project that idealized rural life, built on a belief that if you turned up hopelessly addicted and worked in the sun, learned wholesome values, got dental care and played golf, maybe you could leave drugs behind. The nation, in the throes of the Depression, was flush with ambition if not cash, and drug addiction was seen as more of a bad habit than a brain-based physiological craving. But the odds of success with treatment at Narco were, it turned out, abysmally bad — as low as 7 percent, according to a 1962 survey. [[U.S. Narcotics Farm|Click here for more...]]
 
 
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Revision as of 05:03, 23 February 2020

Featured Article Of The Week

Callan Park Hospital for the Insane


rozelle.png

The Colonial Government bought the whole 104.5 acres as a site for a new lunatic asylum to be designed according to the enlightened views of the American Dr Thomas Kirkbride. Colonial Architect James Barnett worked in collaboration with Inspector of the Insane Dr Frederick Norton Manning to produce a group of some twenty neo-classical buildings, completed in 1885 and subsequently named the Kirkbride Block, offering progressive patient care.

The asylum was the 'institutional linchpin' of moral therapy and the appropriate design of the building was crucial to the success of the therapy. [18] Pleasant surroundings and well designed, comfortable, small-scale buildings were imperative. These aims were embodied in a pavilion-type layout, where small buildings had all-weather connections and the spaces in between were landscaped as courtyards for outdoor activities. Manning chose Chartham Down because it was a pavilion-type layout in which separate ward blocks enclosed airing courts. Ultimately, the combination of Manning's understanding of moral therapy, Barnet's architecture, and the outstanding site at Callan Park, produced a design of a higher standard than Chartham.

Together they designed five male and five female wards, to accommodate approximately 600 patients. The wards were symmetrically arranged about the main cross axis on which the official buildings were planned. Eight of the lofty, airy wards, had large airing courts – some with a view to the Blue Mountains. The other two had high retaining walls caused by the slope of the land. A remarkable continuous covered veranda linked the buildings. Click here for more...