Vox clamantis in deserto
Stupidity will keep you from going insane
Print of the McLean Asylum in 1853, then in Somerville, Mass. It moved to Belmont, Mass., in 1894. Founded in 1811, the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital remains among the world’s most important private mental hospitals, encompassing extensive treatment and research.
"Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad."
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809–1894), Boston-based physician, poet, professor and polymath
No screwballs like him
Print of the McLean Asylum (founded in 1811) in 1853, in Somerville, Mass. The hospital was moved to Belmont in 1895.
“In between the limits of day,
hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts
and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle
of the Roman Catholic attendants.
(There are no Mayflower
screwballs in the Catholic Church.)''—From “Waking in the Blue,’’ by American poet Robert Lowell (1917-1977). The poem is based on his stay in McLean Hospital, a psychiatric institution in Belmont, Mass., that became famous, for among other things, a place for very discreetly treating celebrities such as Lowell. A descendent of Mayflower passenger James Chilton, he suffered from bi-polar disorder.