Tag: Westborough State Hospital

The celebratory lecture and launch of Katherine Anderson’s Westborough State Hospital book on August 1, 2019 was filmed by Westborough TV and is now available for viewing online: http://westboroughtv.org/history-of-the-westborough-state-hospital-katherine-anderson/.

The program was standing room only, and no doubt some people were unable to stay as a result or were turned away at the door, so now is your chance to see this fabulous program.

The Westborough Public Library will celebrate the publication of Westborough State Hospital with a lecture by the author, Katherine Anderson, on Thursday, August 1, 2019 at 7:00 p.m. in the Meeting Room.

Join award-winning author and asylum historian Katherine Anderson for a discussion of her newest Images of America book on the history of the Westborough State Hospital. Katherine has been photographing and researching the hospital for nearly a decade and will present a collection of images, artifacts, and little known facts about Westborough State. As a bonus, meet Mimi Baird, author of He Wanted the Moon about her father’s story of his time as a patient at Westborough.

The Westborough State Hospital, formerly known as the Westborough Insane Hospital, was the second homeopathic hospital for the insane in the United States. Its unique treatment methods were at the forefront of mental health care until it closed its doors as one of the last Massachusetts state hospitals in 2010. Solomon Carter Fuller, a pioneering African American pathologist, studied physical changes in the brain due to Alzheimer’s at the hospital, which was also the only New England state hospital with a dedicated unit for deaf and hard of hearing patients.

Katherine Anderson is a veteran special education teacher and has been researching and writing about asylums and mental health care for more than a decade.