Vox Humana: The Story of the State Hospital Pipe Organ. This item is unavailable.Vox Humana: The Story of the State Hospital Pipe Organ

On a January night in 1929, Frank Weeden stood outside the superintendent's house at the Rhode Island State Hospital for the Insane with a stolen shotgun and fired once through the window at the man who'd denied him parole. The papers called him the Mad Houdini; he'd escaped fifteen times.

Three years earlier the same institution had been Dr. Arthur Harrington's experiment. A physician and a musician, he believed singing could reach what he called "disordered minds," so he put an orchestra at every meal and a pipe organ above the dining hall. The State wouldn't pay for the organ. The patients did: they sold the hospital's honey, and forty-four of them rode the trolley into Providence to sing for it on the radio.

Vox Humana is the story of that asylum from its first years on the State Farm in Cranston, where Rhode Island sent its insane poor because a farm cost less than sending them away. For seventy years patients worked its fields and sat long hours on its benches. One who insulted an attendant spent eight days strapped in a straitjacket, and the Board dismissed the superintendent who ordered it. Harrington died at his piano in 1939, the music for his last work unwritten.

The organ is gone and the dining hall is a parking lot. What's left of them is in this book.

Illustrated with photographs.