Bathtub

The bathtub from hell!

those pitch black doors don't look very peacefull

fantastic shot. It would have been cool to do a different perspective as well

the English language is far too simple to express how I feel about this shot.

Do you remember grandma's lye soap? Good for everything in the home, and the secret was in the scrubbing. it wasn't suds, it wouldn't foam!!

It also ruined the sides of the bathtub.

Wow, this looks like if you took a bath in it, it would be your last!

umm creepy little bathtub!

Yes, this bath tub was actually used for experiments on the patients. I dont know (or wanna know) what kind of experiments they were.

"Experiments on patients"?

That was the whole use for this hospital. It was used for putting the insane as well as those autistic who were thought of as insane. They were put in there, and experiments were performed on them, the bath tub was probally to clean them off afterwards of blood or experimental juices (cannot describe). Thus, i conclude that "experiments on patients" was what this hospital was truly made for; elminating the insane.

Oh, goodness gracious.

~snicker~ Must... hold... back!

Rats are used in experiments, not patients, and this was not a lab, it was a hospital

It looks like an old clawfoot tub modified into a hydrotherapy tub, with the original "claw" feet replaced with stouter iron legs.

Oh Shawn, how you have it so wrong. This was older model of the modern day Jacuzzi, you know, for pleasure only. It was no more than a hydrotherapy tub, for better or worse.

well i guess its safe to say that shawn has a overactive imagination

Well, I hope that's all it is; an over-active imagination!!!!!

I hate to burst anyone's bubble regarding the humane treatment of institutionalized people at the time most of these buildings were experiencing their heyday but it "was" common in this country well into the 1950s to conduct medical experiments on people who were disabled, insane, convicts and those with mental retardation. Just take a closer look at the research of early medical pioneers like Jonas Salk. It was a different time with different ideology. By the way, the photos on this site are gorgeous.

That must be the tiny tub that roams the staircases.

experimental juices? You mean like when I mix mango juice with lime juice to see if it tastes any good? apple juice, lime juice and feijoa vodka.. thats one experimental juice that passed the test!

Lynne????? I take it the soap box fell thru one of those holes in the floor....

But (even being new here) I can still hear you on that one!!! ....Your the greatest!!!

And thanks Motts for the pics they are great as always!!

just wanted 2 add i live very vlose to thos place they r in process of turning into high end condos ive watched them remodle the place for 2 years now but they still havent touched main admin buiidling strange dont know why but it is. nAnd to add some truth to the experiment stories on patients its totally true there is an old farmhouse in wrentham the next town over where they dumped all old mediacal records and x rays from this place in a delapatated barn may i say i have seen xrays or bird cages sewnup in chest cavities and barb wire placed in patients skiulls and then closed up literaly thousnds of xrays

ewh.
i'll need a tb shot just looking at that thing.
(:

This is where they made the bathtub Gin.

Unless you're hittler, or somebody evil like that, why in the world would you want to put barbbed wire in too the head of somebody just because they were disabled? I cannot see the value in this, and true some testing was done on state school children and other disabled people who lived in places such as this I'm thinking here of the tests done in the mid part of the 1900 the thing with the radation? State Boys Rebellion, all that but I really find it hard to beleive they would do such, the only word that comes to mind is natziesc sorts of prosedures. such as barbed wire inside the skull, odds and ends in someone's chest, and such like that. But what do I know? Maybe they did. I hope this isn't the truth... but if it is. God help us, God help us all and forgive us...

Just a few questions:

1) Were the experiments done in the bathtub, or was the tub used to clean the patients afterward?

2) If you don't know what kind of experiments they were, how do you know there were any experiments at all?

3) If you can't describe the "experimental juices," how do you know there were any juices at all?

4)If these barbaric experiments were done, why weren't the records destroyed? Obviously this sort of experimentation would have to remain secret, but the records were just dumped in an old farmhouse?

5) Just how did you become the one--the few-- who knows all these dreadful secrets? With all the class action lawsuits that led to deinstitutionalization, wouldn't some lawyer have already come across this experimentation and used it to help win the case?

Now a few facts:

1) There was a strong eugenics movement in the US, which the National Socialist Party under Hitler took to the gross atrocities of the "Final Solution." By the time the Nazis were in full force committing crimes against humanity, the eugenics movement in the US was in decline.

2) Involuntary sterilization operations were done in the US, made legal under state laws and upheld by the Supreme Court in a majority opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. There were a few doctors who thought that it was best to withhold treatment from newborns with severe abnormalities, but this never went further than a few isolated cases. While there were plenty of people who wanted to prevent individuals with mental illness, and more particularly those with mental retardation, from having children, there was never any proposal to "eliminate" people already living. An excellent book on these topics is "War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race" by Edwin Black.

3)There were experiments done without the kind of informed consent and other ethical safeguards we consider mandatory today, but those experiments were not exclusive to psychiatric hospitals and institutions for people with developmental disabilities (think of the Tuskegee airmen or the studies of deliberate air contamination over towns and schools, etc.).

Finally, it is always a good idea to question, to verify, to THINK. Sometimes people take a subject that has a grain of truth, and expand on it until it fills a whole silo, just to see how much outrageous BS they can get others to accept. Believing and spreading this kind of garbage does nothing to further the cause of better care for people with mental disabilities. It only makes people skeptical of everything you say, and plenty of regrettable actions really did happen. There's no need to embellish with such far-fetched nonsense that serves only to diminish the real suffering that did occur.

sorry so long. I tried to not say anything, but the more I thought about it, the more I had to respond. At least I finally figured out how to arrange my posts in paragraphs instead of one big block :-)

New joke: A visitor to a psychiatric hospital asked the director, "What test do you use to decide what patient is to be hospitalized here?"
The director responded, "We fill up a bathtub and offer the patient either a spoon, a cup or a bucket and ask them to empty it. According to their decision as to what method to use, we decide whether or not to admit them.
"I see," said the visitor, "the reasonable person would of course choose the bucket that is bigger than the cup or the spoon."
"Well, no," said the director, "a normal person would unplug the drain. What type of room would you prefer, private or double, or a ward?"
Dedicated to my friends who choose the bucket.

motts' wet footprints make the photo even more creepy. or were they...?

Judging from the piping on the sides of the tub and the oversized drainage outlets that this tub was probably one of the first hydrotherepy divices.