DAILY STAR
Toppan, a nurse who poisoned at least 31 people with morphine and strychnine and is suspected of having murdered up to 70 more.
Toppan’s ambition “to have killed more people — helpless people — than any other man or woman who ever lived” was thwarted by her commitment to Taunton State Hospital, where she remained until she died in 1936 at the age of 81.
This stunning collection of pictures was taken by Matthew Christopher, of Abandoned America, who had an interest in abandoned sites since he was a child, but started documenting them a decade ago while researching the decline of the state hospital system
Taunton State Hospital in Massachusetts was built in 1853 for $151,742.48 to relieve the dangerously overcrowded State Lunatic Hospital at Worchester.
The building itself was intended to be curative, and the grounds were to “render it a spot fitted to interest and tranquilize the minds of those who need as well as the soothing influences of external nature as the healing remedies of art.”
When the first patient was admitted on April 7, 1854, the State Lunatic Hospital at Taunton was a progressive facility, with residents considered ‘patients’, not ‘inmates’.
In 1936, however, Massachusetts Governor James Curley angrily denounced the unsanitary conditions, overcrowding, and neglect at Taunton. “Some wards I visited were horrible places to put animals in, let alone human beings,” he was quoted as saying.
Desperate measures to alleviate crowding on the wards included insulin shock treatment, wherein an epileptic fit and subsequent coma were induced by a massive dose of insulin, or hydrotherapy, where a patient was restrained in a tub filled with exceedingly…
