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Dull, sleepy. Read, some, in Wilson on Morbid sympathies, lying on bed. Took emetic T. Ant. gr. ii Ipecac gr. vi [two grains of tartarated antimony mixed with six grains of ipecac, to induce vomiting].... Drank cup of tea but vomited it up. Eve. Bright and cheerful, Read Everett’s Oration at Concord.
    Bed 10

    Sunday 11 Dec.
    Rose 7. At home all day unwell. Rx last nt. Pil coch. gr. vi last eve., & Ol. Ric. 6 drams A.M. Operated thoroughly.
    Subject to headaches, fatigue, and malaise, Folsom doses himself liberally with the purgative cochineal throughout 1825. “Ol. Ric.” is oil of ricin, derived from the seeds of the castor-oil plant. One reader of the diary has even suggested that Folsom was a hypochondriac. Perhaps. But if so, he was a very sick hypochondriac, because he died of unknown causes two years after leaving McLean, just after his twenty-fourth birthday.

    Modern times eventually closed in on the flowering Barrell estate. What had been a pleasant, rural setting in 1825 had, just fifty years later, become an urban slum. Four railway lines now girded the property, and the constant chugging, clanging, and whistling drove the McLean staff, well, mad. There was always the fear that an escaped patient might throw him- or herself onto the rails; at least one did. Filthy metalworking factories, a bleaching and dying plant, and even a hog slaughterhouse moved into the neighborhood. A local newspaper remarked that “while the [asylum] has been building up and beautifying within, the opposite has been going on without. What with slaughter houses, miasmatic swamps, the area may be said to be slightly unpleasant if not very unhealthy.”
    By the time an “eloped” patient died trying to board a freight train to freedom in 1888, the trustees had already decided to move.
    Enter Frederick Law Olmsted, already in the prime of his career, with three magnificent asylum jobs under his belt: Retreat Park in Hartford, the Buffalo State Asylum, and the Bloomingdale Asylum outside of New York. Olmsted believed in the curative powers
of sculptured landscape, whether for harried urban dwellers roaming Central Park or for the “harmless monomaniacs” destined to inhabit his retreats or asylums. His designs ran counter to the prevailing notions of asylum construction, which followed the dictates of the so-called Kirkbride plan. According to Dr. Thomas Kirkbride’s theory, asylums should be built like hospitals, with large wards attached to a primary administration building. The Kirkbride layout made sense for the public institutions of the time, which had large patient populations and tiny medical staffs. Garrisoned in the central building, doctors could find their way to patients quickly. Its primary disadvantage was that it lumped the curable in with the chronic, the quiet with the excited, and the rich with the poor.
    Olmsted and his partner, Calvert Vaux, were designing in a new tradition, which placed wards in separate buildings linked, in the case of Buffalo, by covered porticoes or, at McLean, by underground tunnels. The Olmsted-Vaux arrangement had many advantages for patients. Typically, they enjoyed more space in the mansion-style houses that dotted an Olmsted asylum and were not crammed into one overcrowded men’s or women’s ward. Furthermore, by the end of the century, asylum administrators realized that patients fared better and even recovered when surrounded by patients with similar maladies. To this end, the decentralized Olmsted-Vaux designs segregated patients by degree of affliction. The “worried well” lived in wards that were more like homes, and they could roam the grounds with appropriate permission. Cynically, but perhaps realistically, the Olmsted-Vaux plans relegated deeply disturbed patients to the periphery of the grounds, where their rantings resounded offstage. Perhaps most importantly, in an era when McLean’s “inmates” were finally being called “patients,” the Olmsted-Vaux design