Remembering Farnhurst: Stories from the Delaware State Hospital 1894-1920

A Book Review

Remembering Farnhurst: Stories from the Delaware State Hospital 1894-1920

By Katherine Dettwyler

Published by Outskirt Press and Printed in the USA.  611 pages, it is a large paperback with a decent font that is readable by old people.

She gives a good history of mental illness in Delaware, followed by 186 case studies of patients who were admitted between 1894 and 1920 to the Delaware State Hospital at Farnhurst.  An excellent glossary is at the end. The book is broken down into type of mental illness with the case studies related to those illness in that section.  Delaware has three counties and since Farnhurst is located in New Castle County you would expect the most case studies to be from New Castle County and they are.  However about 20% of the case histories are from Kent and Sussex County.  Since Sussex County is the one I am interested in, there were about 25 cases out of the 186 cases given.  When you live in Sussex you get use to getting the short end of the stick when it comes to Delaware.  Some of the Sussex county surnames are; Melson, Williams, Hastings, Johnsons, Hitchens, Cooper, Pratt, Wells, Megee, Jones, Towers, Ross, Gebhard, Malloy, Posties and peiffer.      

The book came about when a maintenance worker found a couple old ledgers at Farnhurst recording the entry of patients, additional ledgers were found, in 2012 Katherine Dettwyler converted 3,000 records from the ledger to a searchable data base.  2460 of those records can be found at farnhurst.weebly.com/the-ledger-project--database.html.

I would recommend this book, not so much for the genealogy information since I am interested in Sussex County but the general history of mental illness in Delaware.  

The book will become a standard for your reference library between the descriptive information given on illness, medicine, institutions in the area, and outlooks in the 1800s and 1900s.