Some of you will be familiar with Col. John Alexander Joyce. An immigrant from Ireland who spent many of his formative years in Kentucky, he would go on to become a noted military officer, poet, author, and player in the 19th-century American politico. He also had run-ins with the law (e.g. the whiskey affair), received a pardon from a US president, and he was very candid about his battle with mental illness.
In his book, Checkered Life, Joyce tells of his early experiences with mental illness. It was in 1860 when, it appears, that the apex of his mental troubles decided to crash land. Joyce explains that he asked his father, living in Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, for a hundred dollars to take off to the “smoky city” of Pittsburg to take a course in bookkeeping. He went by way of land to Cincinnati then completed his trip to the “smoky city” by boat. Joyce was alone, had money, and was fueled by mania that would sustain him for a strange trip.
It was midnight when he arrived in Pittsburg where Joyce found himself wandering the banks of the river. He had checked himself into a hotel by that morning, had a quick breakfast and then went to meet the proprietor of the bookkeeping school, Mr. Duff. In his own words, “If I remember rightly, [Mr. Duff] used an ear-trumpet to assist his defective hearing. I entered my name on the school-roll, purchased some preliminary books, and spent a few hours in writing up a common day journal.” His troubled mind, however, got the best of him by that evening. It was his nominal greatness that made him veer from his original plan.
In his mind, rather than sit around stuffy lecture halls, he could expand his horizons. He went to a printing office in Pittsburg where you had some playbills printed that advertised a show at Lafayette Hall. He further notes that he even had a tin box made for the doorkeeper to store cash for the “rush of natives to hear the most wonderful prodigy of the age!” Joyce appeared on the stage of the Lafayette that night where we dazzled a handful of “stragglers with song, dance, poetry, oratory, and flights of lunatic fancy.” Once the curtain fell and it became time to pay his dues, Joyce managed to skip out on his bill. He spoke of the bill-poster from the Lafayette, “yet I have no doubt that often since they have been the victims of men not half as honest and sincere as I was at that time.”
From the “smoky city,” Joyce made his way back to old stomping grounds in Wheeling, Moundsville, and then on to Marietta, Ohio. It was in Marietta that Joyce was taken up in the county lunatic asylum. “They put me in a small room with bars across the windows and strong bolts bracing the door.” It was then that he came to the crushing reality of the deprivation of liberty. He anecdotally looked back on his “free” spirit before being locked up in the county asylum in Marietta and it was that experience that “aroused the very devil in my tortured mind.” He went on to opine his feelings from that loss of liberty, a “wild beast” in a locked, hot room.
Though he was unaware how, his father somehow managed to find Joyce in the county asylum in Marietta. He promptly made the trip to take custody of his son and bring him back to Mt. Sterling. He talked of his father breaking through his cloud of despair, but his mental illness was never fully at bay. He talked of his experience of coming back to Kentucky, high on mania with a fresh taste of liberty again and proclaimed he had found the “philosopher’s stone.” He picked up a pebble, scratched it, and proudly showed his father that the pebble’s outer coating scratched away to yellow gold. He explained of his father in that moment, “I can see the smile on the lip and the tear in the eye of my dear old father, who seemingly assented to my hallucination, and even flattered my vanity. It took no harsh treatment–no bolts, bars or straight-jackets–to hold my body.”
“Liberty, even in my insane mind, was fostered by love, and although the balance-wheel of understanding flew around without a governor, the soul yet lingered in its sphere, but could not control the insane impulses of the infinitesimal fibers of the volcanic brain.”
Back in Kentucky
Upon his arrival back in Mt. Sterling, Joyce felt as if things were getting back to some semblance of normal. The mania he suffered seemed, in his mind, to be dissipating and being thrown back into familiar territory, and with old friends, made the transition appear easier. Like a ghost from the past, his mental illness was always a few steps behind, and the slightest stumble brought it crashing into him at full speed. A jury in Mt. Sterling was convened and he was declared non compos mentis. He was ordered to the Eastern Lunatic Asylum at Lexington (known today as Eastern State Hospital).
Just days after his arrival back in Kentucky, Joyce was back on the road again. Rather than chasing some fancy or running from the ghost that followed him he was being escorted to Lexington’s asylum. It wasn’t all despair for Joyce though. He fondly wrote that he was “singing with a heart as light as the mist on the mountains.” Upon arrival in Lexington, he described the “long red brick building, four stories high, with regular rows of windows,” as he mounted the steps to the main building of the asylum. The tractable asylum attendants and doctor walked him through a maze of hallways until he reached his destination; an upper ward, “where an iron cot, bare walls and barred windows convinced me in a momentary return to sanity that I was anything but a king.”
He began having flashbacks of his experiences in the county asylum in Marietta. It was fight or flight and Joyce was prepared to do what was necessary. “I hammered at the door, yelled through the window at quiet lunatics on the lawn, upset my iron cot, tore the sheets into strips and made them into a rope, that I might escape imprisonment and descend to the grass, flowers and sunshine that covered the fields and gardens below.” Joyce wasn’t prepared for flight he was prepared for battle. He continued his attack, ripping off all his clothing then talking of the “rough and brutal” attendants who held his body to the iron cot he despised so that he could be tied down.
“No! The soul within was more defiant than ever, and no physical punishment could subdue the God-given mind or curb its flights.”
Joyce continued his fight plan to no avail. It was then that asylum doctors decided to place him in the basement, a place called Botany Bay. According to Joyce, this was where the most violent and “maddest maniacs were consigned to straight-jackets, dungeons, chains and the tortures of living hell!” He spoke of the incessant screaming and screeching, even during the nights. Even in Botany Bay, Joyce did not easily give up. He was eventually chained to the wall and strapped to a bare iron cot, “punished and rebuked for a poor distorted mind that God in His wisdom endowed me with.” Joyce’s more haunting experiences are often with the attendants from the asylum where he claimed, “You may stripe and torture this frail tenement of clay, but no cruel ingenuity of man has et devised the means to harness the immortal mind.”
“Dr. Chipley, the superintendent of the asylum, was an intelligent, though rough-looking, gray-haired man. I imagined that he was an uncle of the devil, and that the patients were all his children. The Doctor, although curt, was innately kind; and I am convinced now that many rude acts were done by the attendants that did not come to his knowledge, else the man who struck me would have been dismissed at once.”
Joyce also got along with first-assistant physician, Dr. Dudley who he spoke very fondly of, “a man whose gentle words and graceful action stole upon my affections like sunshine amid opening flowers.” He would consider Dr. Dudley as a friend in his mind. Joyce spent weeks in Botany Bay, secluded in a room with only an upper window to allow in some light. “My door was bolted, and food was poked through an aperture, as wild beasts are fed at a circus.” His time in the basement was lonely. But he managed to make some friends. But not of the human variety. Joyce said he made friends with two mice and a family of gray spiders. “Part of my daily food was set apart for the mice. At first, they were very shy at my impulsive movements and shrieking voice and would dart into their hole in the wall like a flash. But, finally, kindness begot confidence, confidence banished fear, and in a short time they ate from my hand, played on the cot, or danced around the room to a low musical trill that I whistled for their amusement.”
The mice were not his only friends, either. “The big dark spiders would come out of their thick web and eat the flies I caught for their meal. Sometimes they would fight for their food; but like a metropolitan policeman, I came to the rescue when both were exhausted, and easily captured the combatants and separated them with a straw. Like a well-regulated housekeeper, the wife would soon go to work weaving a fine, brown garb around the eggs she laid, while the “old man” would spin long yarn up and down the wall, scampering over his growing web with the mathematical precision of a scientific surveyor. […] When the mice or the spiders heard footsteps at my door, they would immediately stop play or work and run into their holes, seeming to know that sane man was on his round of ignorance to minister to the insane.”
In time, Joyce gained more trust from the attendants, but he never forgot the cruelty of some of them. Though there was little in his basement room to use, he pulled off an iron heel-tap boot, striking the attendant in the head. “I was perfectly happy, however, in thinking that the punishment he received at my hands was only a just recompense for the secret knocks and blows inflicted upon my fellow lunatics.”
“The occasional dance and theatrical performance in the hall of a lunatic asylum are events of rare interest to the student of human nature. I have attended these amusements both as an insane and sane spectator and must say that in the former I felt more joy than in the latter situation.”
However, Joyce was not alone in his tenure at the hospital. He even made some classifications of fellow patients;
- The chattering type: he walks the wards and taps the bars like a caged beast.
- The moody type: the low-browed man, sitting alone, counting over and over his fingertips or watching the flies and spiders as they buzz and weave in the sunshine.
- The general: he strides through the halls, commanding large armies and fighting great battles at Pharsalia and Waterloo, who imagines himself Caesar or Napoleon.
- The king: in all his royal glory, carrying a broom for a sceptre and a torn sheet for a purple robe.
- The queen: in the next ward over, the consort of the king, she would imitate the strut of the queen with straws and chicken feathers in her hair for a royal crown.
- The confidential: wide inventor, who will tell you of the great things he has done, of the millions he controls, and the innumerable ships that plough the ocean for advantage and profit.
- Jesus Christ: who preaches forgiveness and salvation, ending with a blessing and general absolution from sin, and asking in return only a bit of tobacco–the very earth blossoms at his will, and the sun, moon and stars give light at his command.
- The delicate girl: beautiful, like a weathered lily, humming a low love-song to her darling, who is personated by the pillow in her arms, but who may never again give back the warm kisses that come and go like celestial messengers.
- The fair Ophelia: posturing before a looking-glass with comb in hand, and tangled hair, sighing or weeping for a lover or father snatched from her warm embrace.
- The weeping mother: with despair as she bends over the imaginary body of her babe, sleeping in the shape of a sweet little doll on the broken rocking chair by her side, impelled backward and forward with the wail of a lost spirit.
- The sailor: from the salt sea, swinging right and left, heaving the anchor or hauling away hand over hand the never-ending round of imaginary ropes.
In time, Joyce struggled to get sleep but was still progressing, if it was at a snail’s pace. Dr. Dudley would go on to give Joyce laudanum and he found sleep again until his discharge from the hospital “recovered” after a two month and four day stay.
“Classification, separation and kindness, will tend to cure the insane if there is but a gleam of reason to light up the soul. Force will compel the body, but cannot touch the mind, and the medical fraternity might as well try to dam up the Amazon with green grass as to attempt the cure for the insane with physical terrors. Humor and love, cleanliness, good food, fresh air, and above all, freedom of the body, will make the mind of a madman calm and serene, and bring him back to reason, home and friends.”
Contributed by Shawn Logan | contact@kyhi.org
⁘ Works Cited ⁘
- Joyce, J. A. (1883). A checkered life.
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