Restraint Crib
DimensionsOverall: 59.3 × 147 × 74.5 cm (0.59 × 1.47 × 0.75 m)
Credit LineGift from St. Joseph's Health Care London, 2008
Object number2008.005.199
Label TextThis restraint crib was used to confine disturbed children at the Provincial Mental Hospital in Saint John, New Brunswick, until the 1930s.
The restraint crib, or Utica crib, was used throughout the nineteenth-century to restrain uncooperative and violent psychiatric patients. It has a hinged lid, barred sides, and is around 3 feet wide, 6 feet long, and 18 inches deep- or a mere 12 inches with the addition of a mattress. Patients could be confined in this small space for several hours or even days at a time.
Invented by Dr. M.H. Aubanel of the Marseilles Lunatic Asylum in 1845, the crib found widespread popularity in the United States and Canada after its introduction at the New York State Asylum in 1846. Experts at the time believed that the treatment was more humane than previous forms of restraint, such as shackles and the straight jacket. Patients, however, proved to be less enthusiastic.
Upon admission to the Michigan Asylum for the Insane, Lydia Smith was locked in a wooden crib:
“A crib is a square box, on which is a cover, made to close and lock… the strap attached to the muff [confining the hands] was fastened to a crib in such a manner as to tighten around my waist, and across the pit of the stomach, with such pressure that it actually seemed to that I could not breathe. My feet were fastened to the foot of the crib so tight, and remained there so long, that when they did unfasten them they were swollen so that it was impossible for me to stand upon them.”
Lydia Smith, age 31, had been abducted from her home and placed in an asylum by her husband in 1865. He claimed Lydia suffered from neurasthenia, an ill-defined medical conditioned which caused fatigue, headaches, and above all, emotional disturbances.
Lydia’s story is not unusual. In the nineteenth-century, individuals suffering from symptoms such epilepsy, sexual fervor, impropriety, nervous shaking, war-trauma, and the loosely-defined ‘woman issues’ could be locked away in psychiatric institutions. Countless devices were used to treat such illness, including the Utica Crib.
NameRestraint
c. 1951
c. 1954