This New York Hospital Used Lobotomies to Manage 16,000 Patients It Couldn’t Control!

🔔 Subscribe for new videos every week:    / @stateofruin1   Picture a small town. Its own police department, its own fire department, a post office, a farm, a cemetery, all inside one set of gates. For most of the twentieth century, that description belonged to a psychiatric hospital in Brentwood, New York, on Long Island, where doctors performed one out of every twenty-five lobotomies carried out anywhere in America. One hospital. One in twenty-five. This is the story of how that happened, and of the room where most of it was done, a room that no longer exists. If you're picturing a small, forgotten clinic, recalibrate. The hospital was called Pilgrim State Hospital, and for a period it was widely described as the largest psychiatric hospital in the world. At its peak in nineteen fifty-four, it held thirteen thousand, eight hundred seventy-five patients, cared for by roughly four thousand employees. Long Island got a hospital that size for reasons that had almost nothing to do with medicine. By the nineteen twenties, New York State's existing psychiatric hospitals had become dangerously overcrowded, and in nineteen twenty-seven, then Governor Alfred Smith pushed the state legislature to set aside money for a new facility with a minimum of ten thousand beds. Long Island was chosen partly because land there was cheap, and partly because the open countryside could support what planners at the time called a self-sufficient community. The land the state acquired in Brentwood ran to roughly a thousand acres at the outset, later expanding to nearly nineteen hundred. The hospital opened its doors on October first, nineteen thirty-one. Within nine months, its patient population had already passed two thousand. It kept growing from there, decade after decade, until it wasn't just a hospital anymore. It was closer to a small, walled city built entirely to hold people the outside world had decided it couldn't handle.