THE SOPRANO OF THE DAMNED

Of all the batshit ways physicians have tried to tame the so-called “female malady” of hysteria—and believe me, the list is long and includes hits like “ice-water enema” and “let me just rearrange your uterus with my bare hands”—few were as gloriously, spectacularly wrong as Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride’s disastrous foray into musical theatre in 1877.

Kirkbride, a man whose chief contribution to medicine was designing asylums that were so large and labyrinthine they could have had their own weather systems, got a brilliant idea. He read a book, probably upside down, and decided that the “wandering womb” and its attendant emotional flare-ups were just pent-up dramatic energy. What these sad, listless, or occasionally shrieking women needed wasn’t rest or goddamn rights; they needed an *outlet*. They needed to sing. Loudly. Preferably in Italian. He called it “Operatic Catharsis Therapy,” because giving a stupid idea a fancy name is half the battle in medicine.

So, the grand experiment began at his flagship Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane. Patients were sorted not by diagnosis, but by vocal range. Every day at 10 a.m., the common room was transformed into a stage for a mandatory, and I must stress *profoundly* off-key, reenactment of *La Traviata*. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard twenty women diagnosed with “melancholia” attempting the *Brindisi* duet, accompanied by a single, suicidal-looking orderly on a out-of-tune piano. Costumes were bedsheets and whatever could be pilfered from the laundry. The role of Alfredo was played by a particularly glum-looking broom. According to one nurse’s smuggled-out diary, “The caterwauling is continuous. Mrs. Albright (admitted for ‘heightened sensibilities’) tried to stab Mr. Henderson (the broom) with a fork for missing his cue. The cure appears to be worse than the disease, and infinitely louder.”

The most deranged part? When it obviously, catastrophically failed to calm anyone, Kirkbride doubled down. *La Traviata* was too gentle, he declared. These hysterics needed something with more oomph. They needed *Wagner*. Soon the asylum halls echoed with a truly cursed rendition of *Ride of the Valkyries*, which mostly involved patients in bedpan helmets screeching and running headlong into walls. The project was only shut down six months later when a visiting board of trustees, hoping for a tour of Kirkbride’s famously serene asylum, walked into the middle of what looked and sounded like the final, bloody act of *Tosca* if it were performed by enraged geese. Kirkbride was quietly shuffled off to an “advisory” role, and his magnum opus was scrubbed from the official records, remembered only as “The Unpleasantness.”