“persuading sanity: magic lantern images and the nineteenth-century moral treatment in america”...

Persuading Sanity:

Magic Lantern Images and

the Nineteenth-Century

Moral Treatment in AmericaBeth Haller and Robin Larsen

In the first half of the nineteenth century, whileWestern institutions reorganized themselves ac-cording to philosophies of the Enlightenment,doctors, alienists, and reformers adopted new atti-tudes toward ‘‘the mad.’’1 Abandoning chains andcages for the mentally ill in jails and almshouses,they began creating therapeutic models of con-finement. In the 1820s, they founded the ‘‘insaneasylum.’’ Through surroundings and activities thatuplifted the spirits and rebuilt moral fiber, thenew superintendents of these new American in-stitutions sought to drive out madness with goodconduct.

After 1839, another new American profession-al group, photographers, introduced photographicreproduction and better projection technologiesthat also incorporated ideas of the Enlightenment.For these new specialists, the mission expanded toall citizens equal opportunities for seeing imagesthat would educate, morally uplift, and amuse.During the 1840s, two Philadelphia photogra-phers, William and Frederick Langenheim,worked to make photographic images more ac-cessible, even to those confined to a new insaneasylum in Philadelphia. Dr. Thomas Kirkbride,who had been appointed to head the Pennsylvania

Hospital for the Insane in 1840, sought to com-bine his new ideas about the ‘‘moral treatment’’ ofmental illness with his scientific interests in thenew image projection technology. In 1844, heasked his friends the Langenheims to provide himwith a magic lantern projector and their prepack-aged illustrative slides. From then until he retiredin 1883, Kirkbride scheduled three magic lanternslide shows a week as part of his program ofmoral treatment at the Pennsylvania Hospitalfor the Insane (Layne 189). After 1850, theLangenheims acquired the nation’s first patentfor the photographic collodion process, whichreplaced the daguerreotype process and allowedbetter photographic detail and reproductions.Kirkbride also made available to his patients lit-erally thousands of life-sized photographic images(Hamilton and Hargreaves 37).

Kirkbride announced in 1844 that he expectedthe magic lantern shows to amuse patients, andmore important, to persuade them to shift theirmental state from insanity to sanity. Specifically,he expected—and he never deviated from theseexpectations—the shows to exert subtle controlover patients’ conduct and sense of moral respon-sibility. Framing the shows so as to induce

Beth Haller is associate professor of journalism at Towson University in Towson, Maryland. She conducts research in the area of massmedia images of disability.Robin Larsen is associate professor of communication studies at Cal State–San Bernardino. She conducts research in film history andvisual communication.

259Persuading Sanity � Beth Haller and Robin Larsen

persuasive guilt, Kirkbride also said in his an-nouncement that he hoped they would instillphysical calmness, alter moods of sadness and de-pression to cheerfulness, enhance a sense of socialposition and cultivation, and evoke gratitude to-ward the hospital’s trouble and expense.

Kirkbride’s unusual strategy of using commer-cially manufactured images as tools for curing‘‘the mad’’ brings together the early history ofAmerican institutional psychiatry with the earlyhistory of a photographic screening practice thatbecame a model for early US cinema (Musser 16).Slides and papers documenting the shows at thePennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, which arehoused at Philadelphia’s Atwater Kent Museum,offer a unique chance to investigate how thisnew nineteenth-century screening practice wasreceived within the hopeful context of a new, so-phisticated form of therapeutic confinement formiddle- and upper-class mental patients.

While public magic lantern screenings hadbeen taking place since the late 1600s, when theuse of photographic lantern show slides began, itwas one of those ‘‘moments of profound trans-formation’’ in the precinema history of screeningpractices, Charles Musser explains in The Emer-gence of Cinema (16). Musser argues that suchmoments ‘‘allow for new possibilities, for an in-flux of new personnel, and for disruption andconsiderable discontinuity’’ (16). This was theyear that ‘‘the screen enters a period of flux,’’ asalso happened when motion picture inventorstransferred images onto screens. The screeningpractice then became ‘‘receptive to new influencesfrom other cultural forms; it is at such times thatits cultural interconnectedness becomes most ap-parent and perhaps important,’’ Musser says (16).In the United States, this period of flux in pho-tographic magic lantern show projection contin-ued during the 1850s. During the 1860s,photographic or stereopticon exhibition beganspecializing and receiving widespread praise. Alsoduring these two decades, American psychiatristsand photographers developed a range of new in-terconnections. Moreover, beginning in 1851,Musser explains, ‘‘Philadelphia functioned as thecenter of the American photographic and lantern-

slide industries for several decades’’ (36). All threetrends helped Kirkbride marry his unique versionof the moral treatment with an equally new imagetechnology—the practice of capturing photo-graphs in an emulsion and ‘‘sliding’’ them ontoglass—for use in magic lantern projection.

This article explores the intersection of thesetwo nineteenth-century American practices: themoral treatment movement and photographicmagic lantern projection. It also investigates somerelevant crossovers. It then examines Kirkbride’suses of magic lantern projection as a persuasivetreatment tool in light of Foucault’s critique of thenineteenth-century asylum. In the fourth section,the article explores the Kirkbride experiment’scontribution to early US cinematic screening. Thearticle ends with a look at how this experimentcan be viewed today in the light of shifting twenty-first-century understandings about new possibili-ties for postcinematic image technologies.

TheMoralTreatment

The moral treatment that Kirkbride employedhad its roots in England and France. In England,Quaker William Tuke founded the York Retreatin 1796 based on principles of the Society ofFriends, which were to treat ‘‘madmen’’ with ten-derness and sensitivity. The retreat used no me-chanical restraints or medicine. In The MadAmong Us: A History of the Care of America’sMentally Ill, Gerald Grob says that physical laborwas intended to foster wellness: ‘‘The religiousfoundation of the York Retreat nurtured the beliefthat those who worked were the instruments ofGod’s will’’ (28).

During the early 1800s, Tuke’s son wrote ofinsanity as a distortion or destruction of intellec-tual and moral powers. In contrast to the eight-eenth-century prisons and almshouses thatphysically shackled the insane, asylums for mor-al treatment sought to gain control over patients’moral deviation. The Retreat was designed as anenvironment that would help them internalizediscipline and restraint (Grob 28). Tuke wrote of

260 The Journal of American Culture � Volume 28, Number 3 � September 2005

replacing physical restraints and punishmentswith another mode of coercion, namely fear,Anne Digby reports in her study of the York Re-treat. ‘‘There cannot be a doubt that the principleof fear, in the human mind, when moderately andjudiciously excited, as it is by the operation of justand equal laws, has a salutary effect upon society,’’Vieda Skultans says in Madness and Morals (137).

In the York Retreat’s use of fear, which is re-interpreted by Foucault as a mode of coercionconveyed through speech, the madman wasviewed as stripped of reason because he no long-er expressed guilt about being mad. To be cor-rected, Foucault says, the madman must be madeto ‘‘feel morally responsible for everything withinhim that may disturb morality and society, andmust hold no one but himself responsible for thepunishment he receives’’ (246). Foucault said thatthe Retreat replaced ‘‘the free terror of madness’’with ‘‘the stifling anguish of responsibility’’ (247).It made fear become the chief internal mechanismof control. Through a focus on labor and adher-ence to social order, the Retreat imposed completesubmission to moral rules. Its officers trained pa-tients to avoid falling prey to deviance so as toregain their positions in society. To test their sub-mission, the officers made patients attend tea par-ties and closely observed their charges forincongruities that might indicate madness.

In France, Philippe Pinel influentially appliedanother moral treatment mode. In his asylum, heeschewed religion, physical punishment, seclu-sion, and bloodletting. Instead, he interpretedmental health in the Aristotelian way, as a balanceof the passions. Doctors treated patients’ disor-dered minds by mixing compassion and firmnesswith persuasion, and involving them in structuredactivities. An empiricist who evaluated new ther-apies by outcomes, Pinel applied intelligence andemotion to curing insanity. Foucault describesPinel’s asylum as ‘‘a religious domain without re-ligion, a domain of pure morality, of ethical uni-formity’’ (257). Madness was a social, notindividual, failure, and so the asylum should bea site for social re-education.

Foucault argues that neither Tuke nor Pinelinjected science or medical knowledge into their

treatments of insanity. Nonetheless, both helpedrelabel insane people as participants within themoral and social order. Under moral treatment,the madman, Foucault explains, for the first timereceived a minority status because of ‘‘the insanityof his person, not of his mind’’ (272).

TheMoralTreatment atthe Pennsylvania Hospital ofthe Insane

Like eighteenth-century Europe, the UnitedStates treated insanity severely and punitively.In combining Enlightenment views with Quakerhumanism in order to transform Americans’views of insanity, Philadelphia physician Benja-min Rush, now considered the founder of Amer-ican psychiatry, influenced the Quaker Kirkbrideand his contemporaries. Rush promoted a NewWorld version of moral treatment that com-bined subjective mental activities, such as writingabout personal symptoms and memorizingprose and verse, with physical work, amusements,and travel (Tomes 117). Like Pinel, Rush advo-cated that physicians act with sympathy towardpatients while controlling them through theirphysical presence: eyes, voice, and body move-ment.

During the peak period of the US moral treat-ment movement (between the1840s and the1860s), private asylum heads embraced two goals:improving emotional well-being and improvingmoral responsibility. Kirkbride viewed the moraltreatment as a re-education in how to behave inthe social order. The earlier United States asylumshad treated middle- and upper-class New Englan-ders, a fairly homogeneous group, while relegat-ing the poor African Americans, immigrants, andvagrants to workhouses or jails. When the Penn-sylvania Hospital for the Insane and other Amer-ican asylums opened in the late 1830s, they beganto fill with slightly more variegated middle- andupper-class populations. The wealthier ‘‘native’’Americans were mixed with the wealthier


‘‘foreigners.’’ Men and women were separated, andboth were classified according to four syndromes.

Foucault argues that this newer moral treat-ment model promulgated an illusory definition ofsocial happiness, equating happiness and sanitywith productive labor and associating insanitywith languishing on the fringes in impoverish-ment and inactivity:

In the history of unreason, it (confinement)marked a decisive event: the moment whenmadness was perceived on the social horizonof poverty, of incapacity for work, of ina-bility to integrate with the group; the mo-ment when madness began to rank amongthe problems of the city. The new meaningassigned to poverty, the importance given tothe obligation to work, and all the ethicalvalues that were linked to labor, ultimatelydetermined the experience of madness andinflected its course. (64)

Kirkbride also emphasized the labor of thebody and mind. One of the original thirteenfounders of the asylum superintendents’ associa-tion, a body that would become the precursor tothe American Psychiatric Association, he becamebest known for his innovative architectural fea-tures that encouraged not only work and disci-pline, but also mental activity. According toAlbert Deutsch in The Mentally Ill in America,Kirkbride’s asylum plans were widely copied:‘‘For an entire generation, his word on hospitalbuilding was accepted as law in America’’ (208).He advocated countryside locations on large piec-es of property where asylums could create out-door spaces for patients to work, walk, andcongregate. He called for plenty of large win-dows, one central building, separate buildings forthe genders, and separate wings for wards. SeeFigure 1 for the pastoral setting of the hospital.Kirkbride matched his architectural recommen-dations with those for his moral treatment, whichincorporated a wide range of patient activities,diversions, and outdoor exertions.

Officials at the Pennsylvania Hospital fol-lowed moral treatment precepts when they builtthe Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane as a sep-arate institution in then rural West Philadelphia.

Surrounded by lawns and gardens, the new build-ing replicated asylums like the York Retreat. Itsprogram included lectures, amusements, andclasses. Kirkbride’s biographer Nancy Tomes ar-gues that, instead of mimicking British and Eu-ropean asylums, the founding American officialsenvisioned moral treatment as a series of internalexperiences. When the new hospital began receiv-ing patients in 1841, its program took into ac-count the needs of a fairly wide range of socialclasses. Kirkbride and his board and staff wereprogressive. As associates of the PennsylvaniaHospital, they were familiar with fifty years ofvarious methods. Since the 1790s, they had beenexperimenting with such Enlightenment strategiesas psychological persuasion, classification andseparation by mental disorder, amusements, andphysical labor.

The new hospital’s patients, who were heter-ogeneous but also financially well off, were ad-mitted for various reasons, some purely becauseof their wealth. By the late 1700s, its forerunner,the Pennsylvania Hospital, housed a populationthat was one half mental patients. This detractedfrom the general hospital’s mission to treat thepoor. Being the most costly and also the mostdiverse, mental patients became the best candi-dates for a new institution. The new hospital alsoreflected the Enlightenment trend that Foucaultremarks on: separating the mentally ill from othergroups to maintain proper social organization. Anew asylum could house the older general hospi-tal’s mentally ill population, about half of whomwere well-off enough to pay for treatment. Incontrast, only about fifteen percent of the non-mentally ill patients could pay for treatment at thehospital. Mental patients with means, some onlytemporarily ill, now paid the new PennsylvaniaHospital for the Insane $3.50 a week as Pennsyl-vanians and $5 a week as out-of-state patients(Bond 62).

As the new superintendent, Kirkbride em-braced the tradition of moral treatment but alsostrove to use the newest innovations of the day.Each year, he added new amusements and activ-ities. One of the more popular efforts to enlightenand educate patients to return to sanity was


the scheduling of evening magic lantern slideexhibitions and lectures. They were intended byKirkbride to persuade, control, and amuse. Hebelieved that they encouraged patients to fightdepression and sadness, thereby regaining thehappy demeanor necessary for resuming theirplaces in the social order. He also assumed thatthe slides were a rhetorically persuasive tool forconvincing patients that hospital officials caredfor them. If the hospital provided entertainmentequal or better to that in the outside world, thepatients would believe that its staff members sin-cerely desired to make them well.

Photographic Magic LanternExhibition in Philadelphia andOtherVictorian Cities

From the 1840s to the 1900s, Philadelphia was anational center for this new photographic magiclantern projection technology. William and Frede-ric Langenheim sold numerous stereoscopic viewsto Philadelphians and to the rest of the country.‘‘Stereoscopic photos had a great sale and wereeventually found in almost every parlor of the

day,’’ according to Martin Quigley in Magic Shad-ows (111). The two brothers also ran an exhibit intheir well-appointed building so that passersbycould enter, turn a crank, and see scenes featuringthe illusion of three-dimensional space. As in Eu-rope, meeting halls in the United States began tohost public magic lantern shows in the 1850s.

The Langenheims also patented the first pho-tographic magic show slide-making process andmanufactured a new popular projector called thestereopticon. At first, when the Langenheimbrothers arranged for the patients’ slide show lec-tures, they showed only hand-painted illustra-tions. Nonetheless, they provided their mostcurrent offerings; from the beginning, they ap-pear to have ‘‘test marketed’’ their shows onKirkbride’s patients. In 1850, after the La-ngenheims patented their ‘‘hyalotype’’ (collodionemulsion process for sliding photographic imagesonto glass), they began showing patients theirlatest photographs. For example, the patients werethe first group to see the Langenheims’ show,which ran in the Works of All Nations exhibitionat the Crystal Palace Exposition in 1851, forwhich the brothers received a medal (Quigley111). By 1857, Kirkbride’s patients were seeing allthe Langenheims’ increasingly popular commer-cial shows.

Figure 1.


Magic lantern shows were not new; what wasnew was their photographic content. Accordingto Olive Cook in Movement in Two Dimensions,since the 1790s, magic lantern exhibitors hadtraveled through the largest cities in Europe dur-ing winters to give shows and lectures to publicaudiences. The hospital’s show schedule followedthe same seasonal routine. In the hospital’s An-nual Report in 1844, Kirkbride explained that theshows were given nine months of the year but notduring the summer because the asylum’s exhibi-tion hall was too warm. Like many cultural prac-tices in historic Philadelphia, magic lantern showsremained a seasonal pastime for many decades.An article in Projection Lantern and Cinemato-graph in 1906 reiterated how magic lantern showswere cold-weather activities because ‘‘winter isessentially the time for study and education of themind’’ (1).

As photograph slides replaced the illustrativeones, the older paintings and drawings were pho-tographed and hand-tinted to match their originalcolors. As Cook explains, the reproductive collo-dion technology permitted magic lantern show-men to preserve their earlier subjects but addimages depicting current events. From the 1860sto the 1880s, commercial shows still advertised‘‘sequences taken from popular fiction,’’ alongwith current topographical themes and newsitems (Cook 91). They also continued to depicthistorical episodes, comic effects, and even edu-cational series. Many slide manufacturers adver-tised anatomical diagrams and natural historysubjects. Other sets promoted social causes andreligious movements.

By the end of the nineteenth century in Amer-ica, magic lantern slides were popular but on thewane. However, when cinema emerged, slides be-gan to move into the realm of amateur entertain-ment. In 1899, T. C. Hepworth’s The Book of theLantern began instructing British hobbyists onhow to make lanterns and create slides. In 1914,two Cornell University professors, Simon H.Gage and Henry P. Gage, wrote Optic Projectionfor amateur magic lantern enthusiasts. The lanternslide shows also remained a tool for missionariesstationed in colonial regions. From the 1900s to

the 1930s, slide show packages provided by mis-sion societies helped Africans translate Pilgrim’sProgress and use Africanized characters and set-tings for evangelizing in the Belgian Congo,Nyasaland, and Angola (Hofmeyr 324–29).

Magic lantern shows remained a favorite long-er with the middle- and upper-class groups whohad first embraced them. During the 1880s and1890s in America, they began facing competitionfrom other public entertainments that had dra-matically expanded and diversified: minstrelshows, dance halls, circuses, and vaudeville (May99). The newer leisure pursuits appeared in con-texts with fewer class and moral restrictions. Theshows’ educational and moral content created theperception that they were old-fashioned, one ofthe ‘‘old guard’’ of entertainments. Also, by stand-ards of the newer diversions, they were expensive:a magic lantern show in Philadelphia at the Geo-rama Hall in the 1870s charged twenty-five centsfor admission and one dollar for a package ofeight tickets. Yet these very factors explain why,for mental patients, they remained a safe andsuitable form of treatment for forty years.

The Convergence of MoralTreatment AsylumswithPhotographic Innovation

The collodion process that transformed magiclantern show projection into mass entertainmentwas invented by an English physician namedHugh Diamond and written up in The Chemistby English photographer Frederick Scott Archer,who later became an asylum superintendent inSurrey (Hamilton and Hargreaves 35–37). Asy-lums were among the first institutions to incor-porate photography into their progressivemanagement and treatment strategies. Both newspecialties attracted intelligent innovators withbackgrounds in the arts and sciences: opticians,engravers, artists, precision engineers, teachers,physicians, dentists, and watchmakers. Photogra-phers were also power brokers for other new


specialists because their ‘‘glasshouse’’ studios be-came gathering points for the celebrities, politi-cians, nobility, writers, and poets whose imagesthey exhibited (42–43).

Photographers and superintendents shared an-other concern: cataloging scientific evidence. Pho-tographers joined with professionals in medicine,law, commerce, and industry to reorganize insti-tutions along Enlightenment lines. All worked tocreate data relying on visual description thatwould help them to organize, inventory, and sur-vey social groups.

Connecting knowledge to sight and linkingboth to science were essential elements of anEnlightenment world view that was bothuniversalistic and inclusive. . . . Classificationand measurement are essential to progress,both requiring extensive visualization andthe creation of records . . . (to) be seen orviewed in a systematic manner. (59)

Psychiatrists and photographers specificallyintersected over images of human faces, first as ameans of conveying phrenological and physio-gnomic knowledge contributing to treatment, andlater as data for studies of facial expression. Sev-eral collections of facial images of mental patientsaccumulated after photography’s invention in1839, culminating in the publication of Darwin’sExpression of Emotion in Man and Animals in1872. Like Darwin, his colleague, the superin-tendent of the West Riding Asylum studied facialphotography to demonstrate that human expres-sions were not the results of character, but of an-imal origins (Hamilton and Hargreaves 72). Forhis book, Darwin drew on the collections of fourprofessional photographers.

Both midcentury specialists also shared a largeamount of faith in the human eye’s capacity toacquire deeper insight from photographs as to the‘‘truth’’ of visual reality. Yet at the same time, bothgroups expressed distrust of the new technologyas a purveyor of clever illusion. Kirkbride andother asylum officials accepted without questionthat they could determine visually from patients’conduct their degrees of insanity and sanity.They assumed that their trained clinical gaze

could provide them with sufficient evidence ofthe presence of pathology. Kirkbride claimed thathe could recognize on sight sixteen types of dis-orders (Grob 58–59). Yet Kirkbride was carefulto debrief patients before and after the screeningsso that patients would not carry their experi-ences with simulated reality beyond the exhibi-tion hall.

Finally, at magic lantern shows, photographersrecruited clientele drawn from the two large au-dience groups that the shows addressed: middle-and upper-class Americans seeking to improvethemselves through class advancement and cul-tural refinement, and people from the same classgroups seeking new religious experiences. Thehospital staff and its patients were members ofthese two groups too. In a way, the shows can beviewed as advertisements for both the new tech-nology of photography and the new moral treat-ment for the mentally ill. Also, photographybecame a particularly American commodity. Inlittle more than a decade, photographers set upstudios in every large and small town (Musser 42).

Just as the patients appreciated the realness ofthe many show packages that they saw at thehospital, so did outside audiences savor the feelingof seeing into palpable, exactly replicated every-day worlds. The Langenheims noted in 1851 howmuch audiences liked the realness of the collodionimages. As Musser explains, magnified to life-size,each image has ‘‘a greater accuracy of the smallestdetails . . . drawn and fixed on glass from nature. . . is nature itself again’’ (30).

Reviewers and exhibitors noted that audiencesalso particularly appreciated the techniques thatmade the new photographic images appear tomove. Invented before the collodion revolution,these slide show devices were carried over toshowings of the new photographs, thereby creat-ing even stronger perceptions of realness. A cat-alogue in 1848 claimed that projectionists could‘‘dolly in and out,’’ have images appear to ‘‘travel’’in circular or elliptical directions, make imagesphysically ‘‘shiver,’’ move them by means of leversor pulleys, ‘‘pan’’ across long views of scenes,and have ‘‘slip slides’’ effect comical changes(Musser 43).


Magic Lantern Images atthe Pennsylvania Hospitalfor the Insane

As a method of moral treatment at the Penn-sylvania Hospital for the Insane, the magic lanternshows routinely gave Kirkbride the chance to re-mind his patients of their middle-class sensibili-ties. By framing the slide shows as a pastime thatmiddle and upper classes preferred, Kirkbrideused the shows to persuade them that they stillheld positions outside, within the social order. AsFoucault argues, the patients’ constant remindersof their responsibility to regain the proper be-havior necessary to re-emerge in civilized societybecame the new form of punishment. The slideswere intended to evoke what Foucault calls ‘‘per-suasive guilt.’’ As both prodders and rewards, theslides were ultimately instruments of control overpatients’ emotional well-being and sense of moralresponsibility. As Layne explains, ‘‘The magiclantern shows occupied a therapeutic role inmoral treatment, providing part of the activitieswhich in the 1840s replaced chains and shackles’’(189).

When he began the lantern shows in 1843,Kirkbride underscored this use as an instrumentof control through identification with class posi-tion. He explained that the images benefited theentire hospital as ‘‘our means of amusement . . .not given merely for effect, nor for their tempo-rary influence on patients.’’ However, more im-portant was that the shows’ content and theprivilege of being at the viewings were intended togive patients a chance to emulate the officers andthe ‘‘more intelligent and accomplished’’ patientsand to feel grateful for the occasion, and to gen-erate loyal appreciation for the hospital—andKirkbride himself. Kirkbride explained in 1844,

it has been ascertained in other institutions,as well as in this, that there is a moral effect,more important and lasting. There are fewpatients who do not appreciate the privilegeof mingling socially with the officers and themore intelligent and accomplished of our

inmates; they enjoy the refreshments whichare provided, and readily see and understandthat these entertainments are produced byconsiderable trouble and labour, and thatexpense is incurred for their gratification. Inthis way I have frequently seen a salutaryinfluence exerted, by generating the properkind of feeling for the institution, and of re-spect and confidence for those entrustedwith its management.

Additional proof of the beneficial effectsthus induced, not only upon chronic cases,by adding to their happiness and renderingthem more controllable, but also upon con-valescent patients, is given voluntary testi-mony [from] individuals of high cultivationand intelligence, long after their recoveryand return home. (28–29)

Kirkbride’s focus on how the magic lanternshow rendered some patients more controllableillustrates Foucault’s idea that guilt and moral re-sponsibility were the madman’s figurative chains,and how they were bound by moral responsibilityto behave properly or they would not see theshows again. Kirkbride even inserts guilt into howmuch trouble the hospital took to offer the shows.

Kirkbride also believed that he could use theimages to alter patients’ moods. In mentally en-gaging patients, the shows erased sadness and ag-itation, replacing them with cheerfulness andcalm. As Kirkbride explained in 1847, the slide-lecture exhibitions permitted education andamusement without excitation. He reiterated in1861 that ‘‘much excitement or undue levity ofbehavior . . . is objectionable and hurtful in suchan institution’’ (37). Seemingly inconsistently,Kirkbride strategically used images with a stronghumor component. This too was a mood-alteringstrategy. Even if a show’s subject matter was notamusing, Kirkbride ended many shows with ahumorous image. He appeared to believe thateven the most humorous slides would not inducedetrimental levity, but promote just the rightamount of ‘‘prudent mental employment’’ (1861,20) to break up ‘‘the sad dulness [sic] and gloomymonotony too apt to reign in the evening’’ (1862,25). See Figure 2 for a comic slide.


Ending shows with a comic image was not aconvention of the commercial photographic mag-ic lantern shows. By contrast, commercial show-men ended with religious and moral messages inkeeping with Victorian views that mass entertain-ments should be uplifting. During 1857, thirty-five of the hospital’s seventy-five slide show pres-entations ended with comic slides. These slideswere tacked onto all kinds of presentations, fromportraits of famous Americans to travel shows. Bycontrast, a weeklong calendar of shows at theGeorama Hall in Philadelphia in 1870 shows that,whether of famous people, great paintings, orscenic locations, most ended with religious imageslike Raphael’s Madonna and Child or Leonardoda Vinci’s Holy Family.

Kirkbride’s views on the power of humor—namely that comic images easily manipulated pa-tients into states of happiness—were in keepingwith his theory that insane people’s minds weremalleable. In using this new precinema technol-ogy to induce cheerful demeanor, he cast patientsas childlike and exploitable. This strategy impliesthat Kirkbride also held the belief that the medi-um of the projected photographic image couldchange a patient’s emotional state. Among asylumsuperintendents, his attitude about his patients asmalleable was not uncommon. Moreover, his pa-tients’ families referred to him as a fatherlike su-

pervisor. They even invoked Kirkbride’s moralsuperiority as Christian and physician when theysought to reinstate their dwindling control overtheir hospitalized relatives. Writing about her in-sane daughter, one mother said that she had ‘‘lost. . . authority over her’’ and pleaded with Kirk-bride to remind her daughter ‘‘what to take andhow to act’’ (Tomes 117). Kirkbride perpetuatedthis assumption that he possessed paternal au-thority by explaining patients’ mental problems asthe result of faulty parental training. ‘‘We wouldhave to go back to a defective early education, thewant of proper parental discipline,’’ Kirkbridewrote (Bond 64).

Persuasion and coercion to elicit proper moralbehavior was the focus of many American Victo-rian institutions, not just asylums. The asylumsystem is explained by Foucault as one mimickingthe bourgeois family values of the time, in whichthe success of family-child interactions hinged onthe parents’ degree of moral authority. In a par-allel way, the curing of madness was associatedwith the asylum’s capacity to restore social andmoral order. In the hands of asylum directors,mad men and women became children whoseconduct needed to be mastered by means of theasylum’s subtle control measures. As Foucault putit, ‘‘For this new reason which reigns in the asy-lum, madness does not represent the absolute

Figure 2.


form of contradiction, but instead a minority sta-tus, an aspect of itself that does not have the rightto autonomy, and can live only grafted onto theworld of reason. Madness is childhood’’ (252).

Not every historian interprets Kirkbride’smoral treatment as paternalistic and manipula-tive. For example, early Kirkbride biographerBond interprets his use of slide shows as a meansof conveying respect: ‘‘It would be hard to find amore remarkable indication of respect for theminds of mental patients. It was taken for grantedthat emotion may be sick while intellect went onits usual way’’ (62).

By contrast, Foucault would argue that this‘‘respect’’ was really a form of persuasive guiltused to guide the patients back to their places inthe social order. Kirkbride used the lantern showsto create a moral obligation in the patients tomodify their behavior in such a way as to onceagain fit into the social order of society at thetime. The slide shows themselves were used toconvince the patients that they were not muchdifferent from people outside the hospital. AsKirkbride explained in 1845,

Our experience here, would seem to prove,that during some period of their disease, amajority of our patients are able to appreci-ate all the courtesies and comforts of life, andto participate in most of its employments,occupations and amusements, in a restrictedway, with quite as much zest as a majority ofthe community of which they were recentlymembers. (37)

Not only were the mad defined as childlike,but the prevailing Enlightenment model of thehuman mind was that it was a machinelike entitywith the potential to become literally disordered.Thoughts too had a material basis and so could bephysically ‘‘straightened out’’ through movement.One popular method of moving the mind wastravel, says Foucault. A popular corollary to themoral treatment was for wealthier families to sendmentally ill members on trips to rid them of mel-ancholia. Hence, Kirkbride’s substitute at thePennsylvania Hospital for the Insane was to takepatients on figurative journeys by means of magic

lantern images. Four of the five largest categoriesin the hospital’s collection of 3,160 slides were offaraway locations: England (438), Switzerland(330), Italy (290), and France (240). The onlynontravel subject in this top group consisted ofportraits and historic myths (314). No fewer than24 of the 35 subjects, half of the total number ofslides, were of travel scenes (Table 1). Clearly,showing images simulating journeys was a meth-od of transporting patients away from their prob-lems.

Programs were also ordered as if viewers wereactually on a trip. For example, one slide showtraveled from Philadelphia to Niagara Falls toCanada, back down to Boston to New York,across to Liverpool, and then through numerouscountries in Europe. The spatially logical se-quencing of the lantern slides to make viewers feelas if they were truly traveling confirms DeacRossell’s argument in Living Pictures: The Originsof Movies that, through their emphasis on thisform of visual storytelling, magic lantern slideshows influenced future film structures.

The shows’ focus on travel also mimickedpopular interests outside the hospital. As Quigleyargues in Magic Shadows, ‘‘in those days [the1850s], with the Gold Rush in California justsubsiding, there was great interest in scenic won-ders and views of remote places’’ (111). Travel wasthought to act materially on the mind’s stream ofconsciousness because it is a sensory experience.Medical practitioners in the eighteenth centurysaw sea voyages as a means of synchronizing thebody’s rhythm with the ‘‘rhythm of nature,’’ Fou-cault says (174). Likewise, the mind’s sadnesscould be pushed away by the calm of the coun-tryside and its landscapes. Foucault argues that itwas common during the eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries to expand the medicinal use oftravel past real trips to imaginary ones. ‘‘The va-riety of the landscape dissipates the melancholic’sobstinacy: a remedy in use since antiquity, butwhich the 18th century prescribed with a new in-sistence, and whose forms it varied, from realtravel to the imaginary voyages of literature andtheater,’’ Foucault explains (174). Obviously,Kirkbride also embraced this idea.


With the new uses of photographic slides after1851, Kirkbride again noted in 1857, just as he hadin the beginning in 1844, that the shows improvedpatients’ culture, thereby strengthening their abil-ities to adhere to codes of moral responsibility. In1860, Kirkbride noted how the ‘‘advantages of

photography were still required to satisfy a cul-tivated taste’’ (25). He said in 1863 that photo-graphic images have additional cultural appealbecause of their ‘‘accurate’’ portrayal of the world:

They give us every object in a landscape,every leaf and twig, every blade of grass andevery pebble, no less than the minutest de-tails of the most highly ornamental archi-tecture, every line existing in the costliestengraving and every lineament of a facecoming within the range of the camera, andwith a degree of perfection that no artistcould hope to effect on the small sized pic-tures required for this purpose. (19)

Photographic slides gave patients further cultur-al enhancement because they inspired in patients’minds a sense of perfection, and they kept thoseconfined abreast of the latest cultural works andevents. By offering patients amusements equal tothose enjoyed in ‘‘cultivated’’ society, the Pennsyl-vania Hospital for the Insane sought to persuadepatients to revise their behaviors and conduct them-selves morally appropriately and class-specifically.

The Kirkbride SlideshowExperiment and EarlyAmerican Cinema

What is interesting is that, throughout his en-tire thirty-nine-year span as superintendent, Kirk-bride maintained the same expectations for thisprecinematic technology’s therapeutic uses. Bycontrast, commercial magic lantern showmen ofphotographs did not delineate some of these sameuses for general audiences until the 1860s, 1870s,and 1880s. Most important, Kirkbride viewed thetechnology as a means of controlling throughpersuasive guilt, in addition to using the shows toinduce physical calmness, lift up moods, simulateescapes from confinement, and enhance the pa-tients’ sense of class identity and worldliness.

Beginning in 1844, Kirkbride somewhat eccen-trically staked his reputation on combining theseseemingly dissimilar new specialties then blossoming

Table 1Subjects and Numbers of 4 � 5 Inch Wooden LanternSlides, Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane Slide Col-lection

Subject Number of Slides

Religious 59Statuary and Art 34Dissolving Views 7American History 14Natural History 14Comic and Genre 24Pennsylvania Travel 5Civil War 5Patriotic 8Zoo Lecture 7Portraits/Historic Myths 314Astronomy 12Local Women 40World’s Fair (Columbian) 40Centennial 110Britain 19Egypt 51Yosemite 50Niagara Falls 13Switzerland 330United States 125Italy 290Scotland 56Ireland 35Athens/Constantinople 50Palestine 50Russia 65Philippines 140India 50England 438France 240Denmark/Norway 38Holland/Belgium 52Spain 155Germany 150

Total: 3,160

Source: Magic lantern collection of the Pennsylvania Hos-pital for the Insane, Atwater Kent Museum, Philadelphia,Pennsylvania.


in America: asylum management, photography,and magic lantern projection. This decision, hisacquaintance with the Langenheims (who helpeddisseminate to Americans several new photo-graphic processes), and other fruitful collabora-tions between superintendents and photographersarmed Kirkbride with the motive, means, andprofessional networks to succeed. All three helpedhim frame his experiment so that he could specifyand assess observable results. All three also explainwhy Kirkbride could argue convincingly with hisboard, patients, patients’ relatives, and patrons thatthe shows achieved his desired aims. He conduct-ed his experiment in a consistent, meticulouslydetailed way, just as he supervised all the patients’activities. His goals for the technology’s receptionwere integrated with those for the rest of histreatment plans. This approach of framing and re-framing his experiment so that he reminded hisconstituencies of what he intended—that is, beingpersuasive about a how a new medium could bepersuasive—seems to have worked. Of course, onecan choose not to trust his honesty in these annualreports to his board of directors and patrons. Also,he delineated specific realistic and positive expec-tations. How controversial was that?

Yet Kirkbride’s predictions were sophisticated.By re-sorting the slide packages to end with comicimages, he anticipated by sixty years Hollywood’sdiscovery that happy endings help audiences leavehappily and turn them into regular moviegoers.By manipulating reception conditions to fosterpositive rather than negative changes in mood andconduct, Kirkbride can still be viewed as pro-gressive—especially today, when media conglom-erates steadily feed general audiences thousands ofviolent cinematic images.

In addition to sequencing images to altermoods and framing shows as devices that evokedpersuasive guilt that induced good conduct, Kirk-bride correctly anticipated that the new technol-ogy’s modes of production and reception wouldbe socially progressive. By hosting frequent androutine screenings, Kirkbride provided an exhibi-tion model for other learned slide show exhibitorsand lecturers, thereby encouraging other special-ists to invest in the new field of photographic

magic show exhibition. Like early producers ofcinema shorts, Kirkbride acted as an investor in anew assembly line mode of image production thathe assumed would introduce constructive changejust as, say, the Lumieres and Edison did whenthey transferred their first moving images toscreens in 1895. Also like the early cinema pro-ducers, Kirkbride’s friends the Langenheims ap-plied scientific principles of physics, optics,chemistry, and electricity. And as the applied psy-chologist Hugo Munsterberg argued seventy yearslater, Kirkbride assumed that the new photo-graphic magic lantern technology exerted controlover patients because sequenced life-sized photo-graphic images adhered to psychological princi-ples governing the mental movements of thoughtsand emotions, ordering them and fixing attention.

In testing the new photographic screening tech-nology on a difficult population just as it was be-coming available, Kirkbride also provided credibleevidence to commercial investors that ‘‘normal’’audiences would receive the new photographicscreenings enthusiastically. Kirkbride’s decisions torun the shows three times a week and to contin-ually vary their content provided investors in allkinds of precinematic technologies with an effectiveexhibition model. Finally, Kirkbride anticipatedwhat it took motion picture companies more thantwenty years to understand: that audiences pre-ferred narrative and documentary formats that ad-hered to continuities of space, time, and logic. Healso came to this conclusion a few decades ahead ofother magic showmen, who only in the 1870s dis-covered that audiences preferred ‘‘continuous plan’’shows, and instead arranged the slides in the ‘‘old-fashioned, spasmodic, hitchy way, of showing firsta view of Paris, say, then a comic slide, and then ascripture scene, and then another Paris viewed, andso on, (that) is, without interest’’ (Musser 38).

Conclusions

The magic lantern shows at the PennsylvaniaHospital for the Insane illustrated how two groupsof new specialists in the nineteenth century


anticipated many twentieth-century applicationsfor the cinema and other mass-produced photo-graphic images. Kirkbride and his staff, alongwith the Langenheims, put so much faith in thepositive impact of photographic magic lanternexhibitions that they were sure of their therapeu-tic effectiveness from the outset. The public’swide endorsement of this medium indicates thatothers shared this belief in the projected images’power to foster moral uplift, alter moods, andincrease learning. For American Victorian audi-ences, confined or voluntarily constituted, themagic lantern shows were perceived to have pow-er. Perhaps it matters little whether the showstruly had the force to alter the patients’ moodsand moral behavior. The shows’ social influencelay at least as much in the belief system of hospitalofficials, patients, and society as it did in the ex-hibition experience.

The Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane’s useof lantern slides also provides an excellent appli-cation of Foucault’s theories about how the treat-ment and perceptions of madness changed duringthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and theirsuitability for critiquing American views andpractices regarding madness. Chiefly, Foucault’sideas explain how Kirkbride could conceive of hisuse of a popular new medium as a tool in hismanagement of his patients’ social behavior.

From a visual communication perspective, it isinteresting that Kirkbride viewed his prediction asconfirmed: that magic lantern images with positivecontent and whose conditions of reception wereframed as therapeutic experience within an inno-vative psychiatric institution did indeed improvepatients’ moods and conduct. In more recent vis-ual communication and effects research, less con-sideration has been given to positive uses of mediaimages and more to negative ones. Decades ofmass media studies have focused on negativeresponses to stills, film and television violence,racism, unhelpful gender information, distortedunderstandings of ethnic groups, aberrant sexual-ity, addictive behaviors, fear, and risk taking.

This study illustrates how magic lantern imageswere embraced in this confined environment aspositive and morally satisfying by middle- and

upper-class American mental patients and theirfamilies in the nineteenth century. In the literatureabout the history of asylum management in theUnited States, Kirkbride’s unique use of the slides isviewed merely as a component of moral treatmentof the insane, not as a testing ground for a precin-ematic innovation on a difficult, confined popula-tion. In film literature, Kirkbride’s predictions andobservations about the shows’ uses have remainedlargely unknown. For example, the shows’ use as astrategy for solidifying class position deserves fur-ther study because early moving pictures did notenjoy this high measure of social acceptance. Per-haps the men who dominated the early productionof United States motion pictures, inventor-indus-trialists like Edison, are in part responsible for theirinitial framing as a ‘‘vulgar’’ and ‘‘low’’ entertain-ment. Only after 1908, when socialite crusadersagainst vice began vetting motion pictures, did thehigher-class institutions like churches, libraries, andmuseums stop viewing films as dangerous and be-gin seeing them as tools for improving conduct. ‘‘Inreforming amusements from 1908 to 1914, crusad-ers hoped that movies could help resist the ill ef-fects of modern life,’’ May explains (99). Thus, afteralmost two decades, early motion pictures were—and then only very ambivalently—imbued with thecapacity to persuade society to adopt positive con-duct. Whatever Kirkbride, the Langenheims, andother early magic lantern showmen did, they verysuccessfully sold this new technology as society’shandiest moral and mental tool.

Note

1. Terms such as the mad, the insane, and madmen are used inthis article within context as nineteenth-century terms. It is under-stood that this is inappropriate terminology today.

Works Cited

Bond, Earl. Dr. Kirkbride and His Mental Hospital. Philadelphia:J. B. Lippincott, 1947.


Cook, Olive. Movement in Two Dimensions. London: Hutchinson, 1963.

Deutsch, Albert. The Mentally Ill in America. New York: Double-day, Doran & Co, 1937.

Digby, Anne. Madness, Morality and Medicine: A Study of the YorkRetreat, 1796–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization. New York: PantheonBooks, 1965.

Gage, Simon H., and Henry P. Gage. Optic Projection. New York:Comstock Publishing, 1914.

Grob, Gerald N. The Mad Among Us: A History of the Care ofAmerica’s Mentally Ill. New York: Free Press, 1994.

Hamilton, Peter, and Roger Hargreaves. The Beautiful and theDamned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth Century Pho-tography. London: Lund Humphries, in association with theNational Portrait Gallery, 2001.

Hepworth, Thomas C. The Book of the Lantern. London: Hazell,Watson and Viney, 1899.

Hofmeyr, Isabel. ‘‘Bunyan in Africa: Text and Translation.’’ Inter-ventions (2001): 324-29.

Kirkbride, Thomas Story. Annual Report of the Pennsylvania Hos-pital for the Insane. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Hospital, 1844.

———. Annual Report of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane.Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Hospital, 1845.






Layne, George S. ‘‘Kirkbride-Langenheim Collaboration: Early Useof Photography in Psychiatric Treatment in Philadelphia.’’ Penn-sylvania Magazine of History and Biography (1981): 182-202.

May, Lary. Screening out the Past. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980.

Musser, Charles. The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to1907. New York: Scribner’s, 1990.

Projection Lantern Cinematograph. 1 Oct. 1906. Advertisingbrochure for lantern projector. London: John Wrench & Sons.

Quigley, Martin. Magic Shadows. New York: Biblo and Tannen,1969.

Rossell, Deac. Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies. Albany,NY: SUNY Press, 1998.

Skultans, Vieda. Madness and Morals. London: Routledge & KeganPaul, 1975.

Tomes, Nancy. A Generous Confidence: Thomas Story Kirkbride andthe Art of Asylum-Keeping, 1840–1883. Cambridge: CambridgeUP, 1984.


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