JF Ptak Science Books Post 1161
There are all sorts of famous seats: seats of wisdom, of power, of lameness, of government, of discontent, of honor, of learning, of war; there’s the hot seat, the best and worst seats, a seat on the board, a seat on the bench, a seat at the bar; there are captain’s chairs, endowed chairs, and famous chairs (like architectural gems/mules of Mackintosh, Wright, Saarinen, van der Rohe, Eames, Gehry, LeCorbu) and famous seats (at the original Yankee stadium or a Roman coliseum).
There’s another side to this–the History of Bad Chairs. It is certainly easy to spot the grossly offensive examples–chairs for torture, the working chair of Adolf Hitler, the chairs Bluto used to clobber Popeye with, the terrible captain’s chair that belonged to Capt. Kirk, the offensive seating in Anthony Burgess’ Korova Milkbar in A Clockwork Orange, the final aspect of the condemned as they witnessed the bad aspect of St. Peter’s judgment chair, (and for the Red Sox fan, the chair into which Bucky Dent’s home run fell), and so on. Then of course there’s the electric chair, the battleground of not only the philosophically opposed sides for its use, but its earlier fight as well when it was used as field fodder for the war between Thomas Edison and Nikolai Tesla for the adoption of their opposing electricity delivery systems.
But there’s a subcategory for the subcategory of the History of Chairs and the History of Bad Chairs– the unintentionally bad chair. Benjamin Rush–for all of his good work, for all of his American Founding Fathers heritage and background, for all of his wide humanitarian work–has committed an ignoble applicant to this category. Actually, his ranks among the leaders for unintended gruesomeness, a consequence of his attempt to do good, but just gone wrong.
Rush’s (1745-1813) name is on the Declaration of Independence, and he is also one of the founding fathers of American psychiatry. A medical doctor, his background is very deep in care and ethical treatment, a social liberal who was against slavery and capital punishment, and who was determined to improve the condition and treatment of the mentally ill. Unfortunately, in using the tools at hand and operating with a deep understanding of the contemporary knowledge of neurology and mental disorders, Rush sought to treat the severely deranged (or most institutionally uncorrectable) with his own creation–the tranquilizer chair. Once certain calming measures had been exhausted, Rush described how to retrain combative patients reeking in misbehavior and keep them from ruining their clothing, or harming the handlers, or ruining the furniture of their cell, introducing the use of his immobilizing chair. (There was an associated “mad shirt”, similar to what we know as a straight jacket, that was also invented and employed by Rush.)
His invention, ironically, was very high corporal punishment, what wound up being a torture device for what good it did and the cost it extracted from the person who was to sit in it.
As we can see Rush also commented that the application of cold water and ice would be facilitated with the tranquilizing chair.
A practice that continued at least into the deep 19th century was the dunking chair, whose intent was to “shock” the misbehaving “patient” into docility or normalness. Here we see
some poor sot being drenched from above and also being hosed from the side prior to being dunked into a vat of cold water. No telling how long one might be submerged or how calm the waters must be from bubbly interruptions before being hauled out.
On par with these other instruments was the rotating chair, which was supposed in some way to confuse madness into something not-mad–that, or subdue an unruly patient, whichever came first.
Then there is the dentist-like chair used in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, where the subject–Sam Lowry, accused of crimes against a mega-dystopic state–is tortured into a catatonic state, and in that thin wall between being conscious an dnot so lives in a utopian existence in his mind far from the reach of his captors.
There are of course all sorts of obvious, different chairs in which torture was committed upon people, but I really don’t need to picture them here, everyone knowing what they were, or are: spiked chairs, garroting chairs, spine compressors…you get the picture. Nasty, terrible chairs. Intentionally bad.
Notes:
In addition to the tranquilizing chair, Rush recommended a host of other approaches to controlling the “raving lunatic”. The founder of American psychiatry made the following suggestions:
–Place “noisy” patients into total darkness, (keeping “madmen” for 24 hours or more as required)
–Cold shower baths, slowly, for 20 minutes to four hours
–Solitude; keeping the patient alone, in teh dark, with no visits, no speech, nothing; an “indispensible necessary” to securing correct behavior.
–Bloodletting, with “the quantity of drained blood should be greater than any other organic disease” (page 189), and should “draw 20-40 ounces of blood unless fainting is induced”.
–“Low diet”, which was actually starvation, having the patient fast for one to three days, and then feeding “just” vegetables, “of the least nutrious value”.
–Freezing, in addition to cold shower baths, as in placing the patient in the middle of the night outside in freezing cold. Ice could also be used on the head, but not before the head is completely shaved, as the effect of hair on the brain and madness “we know not”.
–Blistering, which is not a known process to me, except that blisters be induced on the ankles rather than on the head or neck.
There was also treatment via purging, emetics, and the employment of small amounts of opium “to waste the excitability” and reduce fatigue to keep the patient awake.
