New Jerusalem Sanitarium - 225 E Derby Street
This institution, supported partly by Commonwealth funds, is at the edge of town. For paying patients, who supply the great majority of the sanitarium’s trade, the cure chance is about 45% per year. Indigents, while receiving adequate care, get little therapy; the yearly chance of a cure for a pauper is 20%. Normal in-patient treatment costs $110 a month. With fifty beds, the New Jerusalem Sanitarium is the largest such institution between Boston and Portland, Maine.
Dr. Eric Hardstrom, a hard working if uninspired man, heads the facility, and shares duties with two other physicians. A staff of twelve nurses and orderlies, a groundskeeper, and a maintenance man work under them. There are also small pathological and clinical laboratories. A number of the county’s doctors have staff status at the sanitarium. Staff quietly observe that New Jerusalem seems to have a very high level of mental illnesses.
The New Jerusalem Sanitarium employs modem psychiatric treatments. Though the grounds are fenced and the sanitarium windows barred, restraints and strait jackets are rarely used. Sleep-producing and - alleviating drugs, dietetics, physical culture, hydrotherapy, and electric shock are often prescribed.
Recently, resident psychologist Dr. Bruce Ballantine noted a pattern among his patients mental illness: many suffer from the same - or very similar - delusions. He has published his findings in the Journal of Clinical Psychology (Unseen Voices: Mastering the Presence of Shared Delusions in Psychotherapy).
Dr. Ballantine has been working with one patient very closely. Sean Findaca is able to articulate very clearly the sound of these voices, and the feelings they create. Findaca has also been able to succinctly describe dreams of cyclopean cities rising from the dark oceans. Out of these cities horrible, winged creatures take to the tenebrous sky. Findaca, meanwhile, now psychotically mad from these dreams, is planning to kill the unsuspecting Ballantine. He knows now the doctor is the one placing these wicked dreams in his head.
Among the indigents housed in the basement ward is one as yet unidentified. The man was found wandering the streets of Blaine's Port around Christmas of 1937 in an amnesiac state. Various treatments were attempted. Alas, none of the treatments have helped to restore his mind or memory.
Ernest Tilton works as an orderly at the sanitarium, a job he is not that fond of. He isn’t a bad orderly as such and doesn’t mistreat the patients, but he doesn’t go out of his way to help them either. Ernest is just filling in time for money at the facility, and he would love to work somewhere, anywhere else. Those with money who inquire discretely will discover that time isn’t the only thing that Ernest is willing to exchange for money. During his time at the sanitarium, Ernest has heard many things from patients; disturbingly to him, some appear to have shared delusions.
Type
Hospital
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