In the tradition of The
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a page-turning 93-year
history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the nation’s last
segregated asylums, that New York Times bestselling author Clint
Smith describes as “a book that left me breathless.”
On a cold day in
March of 1911, officials marched twelve Black men into the heart of a
forest in Maryland. Under the supervision of a doctor, the men were
forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and harvest
tobacco. When construction finished, they became the first twelve
patients of the state’s Hospital for the Negro Insane. For
centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books.
Madness transports readers behind the brick walls of a Jim
Crow asylum.
In Madness,
Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the
93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last
segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still
stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. She blends the
intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by
Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and
archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black
families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes
failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own
family’s experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame
that it reproduced for generations.
As Crownsville
Hospital grew from an antebellum-style work camp to a tiny city
sitting on 1,500 acres, the institution became a microcosm of
America’s evolving battles over slavery, racial integration, and
civil rights. During its peak years, the hospital’s wards were
overflowing with almost 2,700 patients. By the end of the
20th-century, the asylum faded from view as prisons and jails became
America’s new focus.
In Madness,
Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black
people’s bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system.
It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America
decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care or
irredeemable.