Podcast: 2
Psychiatrist Rounds at Morningside Hospital
“[Patient] bases her hospitalization on the fact that she had to work hard and lived in poverty due to multiple children. Her children are now in a foster home and I feel that this has given her relief from one of the precipitating factors of her marked psychotic reaction.”
Questions to Explore in this Podcast:
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How does this conversation illuminate the real constraints psychiatrists faced in the 1950s in terms of treatment resources and options for post-discharge patient care?
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How does the language psychiatrists used to describe patients reveal their views of patients’ temperaments, personalities, illnesses, and humanity?
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What were some of the particular challenges psychiatrists at Morningside faced due to the fact that so many of the patients there were originally from Alaska?
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How did Morningside staff respond to criticism made about the hospital?
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What tensions are apparent here about the problems embedded in inpatient psychiatric care more generally?
Episode Overview:
In this episode, we focus on the ways in which psychiatrists and other staff at Morningside talked about their patients, and how they referred to the broader social and historical circumstances causing the hospital to come under increasing political oversight and public scrutiny during the 1950s. The episode gives a glimpse into a typical staff meeting at Morningside, and is compiled from a collection of staff meeting minutes (notes) archived in the DeWitt Burkes papers at the UO Special Collections and University Archives. Morningside staff meetings usually lasted about 45 minutes, and opened with an administrative update, where hospital administrators gave reports about hospital finances and administration, and continued with a medical report on patients of concern, where the psychiatrists and nursing staff present at the meeting weighed in about different patients. This podcast is built verbatim from Morningside meeting minutes between 1955-58, though we have changed or eliminated names of patients to protect their privacy. The podcast reviews a variety of issues facing doctors and staff and patients at Morningside, including resource limitations, political scrutiny, and accusations of mismanagement being directed publicly against the hospital at the time. (Special thanks to Laura Stowe, UO student, for her assistance with the development and recording of this episode.)
Voice Actors:
Keller: Alex Mentzel
Thompson: Ward Fairbairn
Coe: Rachel Lamb
Burkes: Laura Stowe
Dowling: Ward Fairbairn
Podcast music: “Varied Thrush” by Stephan Nance
