University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics Medical Museum

Diagnostik

The Straightjacket and Utica Crib

Straightjacket circa 1900 "Though it looks like an implement of torture designed in the Dark Ages, there are times when it looks like God's protecting arm round you." Lara Jefferson, These Are My Sisters, 1947

6.Courtesy of the Medical Museum.

6.Courtesy of Marguerite Perret and Bruce Scherting.

"I looked back at the immense expanse of the jacket. A perspiration soaked, evil smelling coffin for my madness." Deborah in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg, 1964

Utica Crib
Reproduction of a 19th century restraining device

6.Courtesy of the Medical Museum.

The Utica crib was named for the New York State Lunatic Asylum at Utica where it was heavily used in the 19th century to confine patients who refused to stay in their beds. Based on a French design, the structure was modified to incorporated slats and rungs that gave it an appearance similar to a child's crib.

While use of the Utica Crib was widely criticized and infamous among patients, some found it to have important therapeutic value. A patient who slept in the Utica crib for several days commented that he had rested better and found it useful for "all crazy fellows as I, whose spirit is willing, but whose flesh is weak." (Journal of Insanity, October 1864.)

In an opposing view, Daniel Tuke, a noted British alienist (an early term for a psychology expert) writes that, "it inevitably suggests, when occupied, that you are looking at an animal in a cage. At the celebrated Utica Asylum... where a suicidal woman was preserved from harm by this wooden enclosure... Dr. Baker of the New York Retreat allowed himself to be shut up in one of these beds, but preferred not remaining there."