Word: seabrook
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...December evening in 1933, William Buehler Seabrook, journalist, traveler, author of widely-read adventure stories (Adventures in Arabia, Jungle Ways}, succeeded in getting himself locked up in a large and well-run New York insane asylum. His ailment was acute alcoholism...
Discovering that big psychopathic institutions did not welcome dipsomaniacs, whose cure is long and uncertain, William Seabrook encountered legal and medical difficulties in entering the institution he had chosen.* But they were nothing compared with the difficulty of getting out again...
Slow in awakening to his surroundings and to the reality of his confinement, Patient Seabrook's first reaction was that everything was wrong. He had wanted a nice, quiet, secluded cell where he would not be able to get his hands on a bottle of whiskey. He found himself in a modern hospital resembling an expensive hotel, where he was compelled to meet and talk with other patients, and where he slept in "a wide-open show window, an illuminated dog kennel." The medical attention was so close that, as he objected profanely, "people come walking...
Doctors, nurses and stalwart male attendants treated him like a spoiled child. He objected to being politely addressed as Mr. Seabrook by people who were deaf to his complaints, objected to having the light burn in his room all night, objected more loudly when attendants removed the bathrobe he had used to shade the light...
...world in general, calling for a padded cell as preferable to modern scientific, heartless hypocrisy, another patient told him quietly: "Say, fellow, you've got it all wrong. You don't tell them. They tell you." Once he had accepted its concealed, but absolutely inflexible, discipline. William Seabrook found the asylum a pleasant and interesting lockup. Soon he was walking miles through the snow, going regularly to the barber shop, whether he wanted to or not, attending compulsory dances and cinemas, and in the spring playing golf and tennis. But he could...