Madness Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

Antonia Hylton

eAudio - 2024

In the tradition of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, this New York Times bestseller is a page-turning account of one of the nation's last segregated asylums..."a book that left me breathless" (Clint Smith). For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers through the ninety-three-year history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Antonia Hylton blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families wh...ose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family's experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for... more