Doing Time in Dauphin County, 1842-1901

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on Doing Time in Dauphin County, 1842-1901 They locked up Elias Nation on April 18, 1842, giving him official first place in Dauphin County’s new prison. (For the record, Jacob Stripe was registered nearly two weeks earlier, for assault and battery, but he was out before the prison’s grand opening.) Nation was twenty­-nine years old and looked “yellow,” wrote Keeper Wil­liam Watson; he underlined that fact in his...
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“Little Doc”: Architect Of Modern Nursing

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on “Little Doc”: Architect Of Modern Nursing Lavinia Lloyd Dock (1858-1956) labored long and hard as educator, settlement worker, historian, author, editor, columnist, pacifist and radical suffragist. Beyond this, she strove to internationalize the public health movement while continually elevating the status of women. But her contributions to the field of nursing­ – which helped transform what was then a despised trade into a...
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Behind the Battle of Gettysburg: American Nursing Is Born

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Behind the Battle of Gettysburg: American Nursing Is Born The battle of Gettys­burg cannot only be characterized as the turning point of the Civil War, for it was so much more. During the war, with casualties high and the need undeniable, women entered hospitals to care for the wounded, but – shockingly­ – were made to feel unwelcome. These resolute women, though, stood fast, and pro­ceeded to establish a new profession. When the war...
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Bedlam in Penn’s Woods

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bedlam in Penn’s Woods Pennsylvanians have been concerned with the welfare of the insane since the earli­est provincial days. Indeed, as befits the Commonwealth’s humanitarian Quaker heritage, Pennsylvania has made pio­neering efforts in the field. For most of the pre­Revolutionary period, care of the mad was restricted to physical support and occa­sional confinement for public safety. Victims’ families...
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Lost and Found

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Lost and Found Lost For nearly a century and a half, Reed Hall – designed in 1862 by J. W. Kerr according to prevailing recommendations for asylum construction by reformer Thomas Story Kirkbride – dominated the grounds of Dixmont State Hospital in Allegheny County, near Pitts­burgh. Founded originally as the Western Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane in 1853, the facility occupied four hundred...
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Waging War Their Own Way: Women and the Civil War in Pennsylvania

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Waging War Their Own Way: Women and the Civil War in Pennsylvania Pennsylvania’s recently conserved Civil War Muster Rolls, housed at the Pennsylvania State Archives, document the commonwealth’s contributions to the Union. Nearly 345,000 Pennsylvanians served in the U.S. Army during the war, or approximately 60 percent of the adult male population.1 A century and a half ago clerks carefully transcribed the names, ages, regiments, and brief...
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