Convergent Project
The Saint Joseph Museum represents 145 years of history on the state hospital and mental health treatment. The Glore Psychiatric Museum is located on the grounds of the original state hospital. The museum has many different exhibits which include the Glore Psychiatric Museum, the Black Archives Museum, the Doll Museum, the Native American and History Galleries and other temporary exhibits.
I will be focusing mainly on the Glore Psychiatric Museum. The Glore Psychiatric museum displays different equipment that was used in the hospital, pieces of furniture like rocking chairs, uniforms, surgical tools and other items and equipment from the hospital.
Dr. Evan Hart is a history professor at Missouri Western State University and provided her opinion on the Glore Museum covering the history of psychiatry and torturue.
“It’s important for us to know the history of psychiatric treatment as it reveals the ways in which we understood mental illness in the past. It also helps us understand the ways in which we have, and haven’t, progressed in how we treat those dealing with mental illness. It’s important to place these histories within context, however, and the museum does a great job of doing this. While we look at previous psychiatric treatment as torture, and sometimes it truly was, often physicians and nurses were doing the best they could with the information available to them at the time. We like to believe that we’re more progressive and that we have all the answers, but we don’t”. Dr. Hart said.
The Glore Museum’s exhibits include the tools that were used during surgeries, the morgue, different treatments, photos, artwork, poetry and more. Most of the artwork in the museum is from patients at the hospital. The different artwork gives tourists a glimpse into the minds of the patients with mental illness.
Some of the patients’ artwork can be located in the tunnels of the museum where dead bodies were transported. One side of the tunnel shows the paintings painted by children at the hospital and the other side are paintings painted by the adults at the hospital.
Campbell Kennedy is a junior at Missouri Western State University and she is an intern at the Saint Joseph Museum.
“I’m an intern at the museum and I love it. I go to Missouri Western and I’m a junior majoring in history. History is something that I have always had a passion for. I think being able to help out at the museum and exploring what is here is really interesting. I feel like I learn more and more every time I go in”. Kennedy said.
Most of the history and psychology classes at Missouri Western State University do not necessarily learn about the Saint Joseph Museum or the mental hospital but they do learn about the history and different disorders that relate to the museum. Dr. Teddi Deka is a psychology professor at Missouri Western that explained some of the classes that she teaches.
“One of the classes that I’m teaching now is on the history of psychology in Europe and we do examine asylum models and stuff. The asylum in Saint Joe was based on the kirkbride plan for how they constructed the asylum and our asylum actually follows a lot of the trends at the time it was built so I do have some knowledge of that. I used to take my introductory psych classes to the museum but this particular class that I’m teaching right now is psych 460 and we study the history of madness around the 1800s. We look at how Europe influenced the United States but also everything came out of the European model. The Glore Museum has a lot of the elements and famous people that we talk about in class, the Glore is great to have here”. Dr. Deka said.
Dr. Hart also mentioned that she talks about the museum a little bit in some of her classes that cover race and mental health in American history. Dr. Hart encourages all students to visit the museum because there aren’t many like it open throughout the country.
The communications and group tour director of the St. Joseph Museums is Kami Jones. Jones has a background in travel and tourism and then worked as a quality control engineer at a steel plant for quite some time. It wasn’t until her daughter began to struggle with mental health issues at the age of 12, that’s when Jones started working at the museum.
“When my daughter was 12 she had some problems and mental health issues. We spent a lot of time in and out of hospitals and working with therapists and psychoanalysis, all kinds of stuff. I came here 8.5 years ago to volunteer because I wanted to learn. While I was still working as an engineer I was here giving tours and learning about the history of mental health and treatment. I often talked to Dr. Clark at the new hospital and did some research just because I wanted to learn more and figure out what was going on with my kid. It took us about two and half years but we figured out her diagnosis which is borderline personality disorder. Last year after covid, my company did some downsizing and I was either going to be transferred overseas or take a buyout. So I took a buyout and I went and lived in Yellowstone for 6 months, worked there and started getting back into travel and tourism. I worked with different group tours and planning vacations for the people coming on vacation. This is when I was offered to come back home and work at the museum”. Jones explained.
Kami Jones also explained how the Glore Museum is their biggest pull because it’s the biggest mental health museum in the world so it has a lot of press and following. That being said, the other exhibits don’t get as much recognition. The Native American gallery includes the Harry George collection and that’s one of the largest and most well documented Native American collections in the United States. The museum also has the Black Archives, a World War I display and the Doll Museum.
The Glore Museum is so important today because they try to display everything that had happened in the past so that history doesn’t repeat itself. The Glore Museum might be considered creepy or weird to tourists but its purpose is about learning about the history and the things that people did. The museum doesn’t sugar coat anything that had happened at the hospital, it’s important to learn from past mistakes so that we don’t go down the same path.
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