Danvers State: Memoirs Of A Nurse In The Asylum

Underlying the wandering musings of an aged working class woman who seemed more interested in the time she and her husband got their first television set (she mentions that red-letter-day occasion several times)is an initial coldness and not a little cruelty. She pays lip service to the plight of the patients, but every other epithet applied to them is "loony" "crazy" "nuts" "insane". She even calls Danvers "the nut house", and "the lunatic asylum" and one can almost hear her caustic exchanges with the desperate patients in her charge: "There'll be three dead bodies here, because I'll beat the sh-- out of you if I have to."The viciously morbid, sadistic jokes she played on student nurses and interns are horrible. It's more than a lack of education which makes her background that of low breeding and peasant ignorance. Would you honestly have wanted this woman to have been your nurse, whether in a psychiatric hospital or a regular one? No wonder mental hospitals in those days only attracted the lowest common denominator. Places such as Byberry, Milledgeville, and Cleveland's notorious "Turney Tech", with their penury wages and malevolent surroundings, drew the ruthless, the brutal, and the low-down for state hospital employ - - and the hideous abuse of the patients by attendants and many nurses and doctors was the terrible result. Making the care of the mentally ill a family industry for the Szots must have meant an endurance of hard-boiled, indifferent caretakers for the Danvers patients.Certainly, Mrs. Szot's childhood was to be pitied -- it didn't mold a very sympathetic personage, from the miserly, autocratic father who drove her frail mother to her death with repeated childbearing and backbreaking labor; immediately remarried months after her demise; and sent his daughter out while still in her early teens to work in the mills. That would harden anybody, and not to be exposed to education and culture turned out this despicably uncaring creature as a result.That said, the book is shallow and undescriptive. As I am researching the history of mistreatment in early-mid 20th-century mental hospitals for a novel I'm writing, I'm keeping it as proof of "what kind of people" usually worked at such institutions.

Danvers State Insane Asylum is in the process of being torn down, with only one-third of the Kirkbride Building to be restored by Avalon Bay Company for apartments. This building is (was) on the Register of Historic Places and is a beautiful example of Victorian architecture. I signed the petition to preserve the entire buiding, but to no avail. Therefore, I wanted to get any information I could about the running of the Asylum. This book is very informative with regard to patient care -- I wish Ms. Szot could have been more descriptive with regard to the Kirkbride building or the outbuildings. However, if you are interested in the Danvers Asylum, this is a must have book.

Its all right. Short. Not really about her work at Dancers but mainly about her family. She was 78 when she wrote it so I'll give her that. Lol for her age its not bad. The best part IMO was the flying cockroaches. Lmao

Having read as extensively as possible about Danvers State and also having the luxury of hearing first-hand accounts from locals who worked there, I expected an informative book full of interesting tales, accurate descriptions of patients' daily lives, perhaps even photos from Szot's time spent there. This book reads like what it is: some random memories of an aging woman who wants to recount her past. This book is VERY poorly written, mind-numbingly repetitive and contains but a few very short anecdotes of various patient behaviors. Szot describes many of her duties as aide and nurse, (often several times throughout as though the book never met the eyes of another reader let alone an editor before its publication!)but it also annoyingly rambles on about Szot's family life, from her childhood to her pregnancies and beyond. I continuoualy found myself saying, "Get on with it!" or "Yes, you've mentioned that three times already!" From beginning to end I waited and waited to get to the "good part." Sadly, there wasn't one. I truly understand the desire of the elderly to share the stories of their lives, but if you're looking for an interesting recount of the life and times of Danvers State and its patients, look elsewhere!

This was an excellent true story of a woman's struggle and success at becoming a nurse in a time when all odds were against her. The descriptions of the conditions and standard operating procedures of the State Hospital were very eye opening. A good first hand history of the evolution of the State Hospital system in America.

Even after reading the dismal reviews for Danvers State, I still decided to give the book a chance. I wholeheartedly regret that decision. Reviews said that the book was poorly written, and they are correct. Previous readers claim that there was a lot or repetition, and there is. I also noticed that the author wasted a lot of print reliving family stories that had no bearing on the book itself. The reading level of the book was so low that I finished it in a few hours. This could have been a great book, but its shortcomings reduce it to something almost unreadable.

I find the book very creepy. I can relate to what stories the Nurse had to tell since I too have delt in this field of work.I enjoyed the book because I know what was told is genuine.

It was not what I expected as I thought it would be more detailed .I would ride by the hospital on my way to Ct from Me.when I was young and I was curious about it. I think there is more of a mystery to it then what was written in the book.

I bought this book thinking it would be a detailed account of a nurse's time spent in a mental institute. What I got instead was 146 pages of double spaced typing, (so the actual amount is probably half that number) which read more like the author's notes she was working from, rather than an actual memoir. We are given the bare bones of what life was like in the institution, and I think the author talks more about her home life and her children than she does about the actual subject of the book.We get informed 3 or 4 times that there were many diseases brought in by the patients, but the author herself was lucky enough never to take any home to her family. The same story is told in different guises 2 or 3 times about a patient throwing a food cart across a room.Overall, a repetative book which is very short on detail and I was left no wiser about life in an 'asylum'.Don't waste your money!