The New Jersey Lunatic Asylum was supposed to usher in a whole new age of psychiatric study, it was to be an embodiment of the country's enlightened mentality toward those less fortunate. Instead, just under sixty years after opening, this asylum had become a hellish prison for the mentally and physically handicapped patients trapped inside. Today it serves as the setting for one of the darkest tales in the history of psychiatric medicine, and it all began when Dr. Henry Cotton became medical director in 1907.

Cotton was a firm believer that the onset and persistence of mental illness in a person stemmed from infections within one's body. In order to preserve and restore the troubled minds of the patients under his care, the doctor and his staff took to removing the patient's teeth. It was Cotton's belief that the teeth were the most likely location in a patient’s body to house infections. However, if symptoms persisted after teeth removal, additional body parts were systematically removed. The next most common organs to be removed if tooth extractions failed were the tonsils and sinus. From there the patient could loose a number of internal organs, including but not limited to the colon, cervix, ovaries, gall badder, stomach, spleen, and testicles. Based solely upon his own research and experimentation, Cotton publicly reported a wonderful success rate for his patients. The study of infections was still a new science at the time, and due to his alleged link between that and mental illness, Cotton garnered much praise in the medical community both in the United States and Europe.

Dr. Cotton's celebrated life work left hundreds dead and thousands mutilated...


The full story can be found here -
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The New Jersey Lunatic Asylum is featured in issue #37 of Weird NJ magazine -
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Music: "When Sorrow Shoots Her Darts" and
"Holy Throat Hiss Tracts To the Sedative Hypnotic" (abridged) by Set Fire to Flames

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