Author Description

Two Years and Four Months in a Lunatic Asylum is a memoir of the author's time spent in a Utica, New York insane asylum. I have been urged ever since I left the mental asylum, by friends, to write my history of those two unfortunate years, and give it to the public. This I did purpose to do while I was in the mental asylum, as soon as I left it, while all things would be fresh in my memory. But after leaving that place, and mingling again with the world and with my friends, the very thought of the subject sickened me, for I desired to think and talk as little about the matter as possible. Besides this, in eighteen months after I left the asylum I entered upon the regular work of the ministry again, and did not wish, while in the effective work of the ministry, to mix with it the history of those two unhappy years, of which I knew, the public had no adequate conception; and which, if I should write out faithfully, would develop facts which many would disbelieve, while others would only laugh at them, as freaks of my insanity, and not as sober truths.