Departmental insane asylum in Düsseldorf

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Front view, 1864

The Departmental Insane Asylum in Düsseldorf was a public institution for "incurable mentally ill people" from the Düsseldorf administrative region , located on the Rhine in Unterbilk .

history

Bank of the Rhine in Düsseldorf Neustadt with the Rhine open-air swimming pool, engraving by Joseph Maximilian Kolb after a picture by Ludwig Rohbock (around 1850)
Location of the insane asylum, in the section of the city map Neustadt and Bilk (1890)
Düsseldorf harbor and Unterbilk (1900)
City Port of Düsseldorf (1926)

In 1823, the main poor administration in Düsseldorf , the poor supply institute for the city and foreign citizenship of Düsseldorf founded in 1800 , bought the Böhnert house in the Neustadt in order to build an asylum for the administrative district of Düsseldorf . The money originally came from a charity fund of the grand-ducal Bergisch Rhine department . By government decree of June 1825 it had been determined that the administration of the new institution was not to be run by the city, so that a special departmental charity commission was formed, which, among other things, administered the insane asylum fund . Members of this commission were appointed on October 24, 1825, Graf von Spee zu Düsseldorf, Freiherr Friedrich von der Leyen zu Krefeld, Freiherr von Bothmer zu Xanten , businessman Peltzer zu Elberfeld, Lord Mayor Klüber zu Düsseldorf and two honorary members.

In 1825/1826 the Böhnert house was converted to accommodate forty patients. Under the direction of the medical councilor Carl Leopold Bournye (1787–1865), the institution was opened in autumn 1826, initially with fourteen mentally ill patients . It was under the supervision of a board of trustees of initially three and later five people, including the chief medical officer. A regulation for the Departmental Insane Asylum dated September 1826 regulated the internal administration and set the annual nursing care rate for all sick people accommodated at the expense of the Düsseldorf administrative district. According to its basic definition, the Departmental Insane Asylum was founded as a place of storage and not as a therapeutic and therapeutic experimentation institution . Sick people should be prevented from escaping , if possible with gentle and humane treatment, but somatotherapeutic treatments for immobilization, such as forced vest, forced chair, chest and hand straps, were recommended. Activities such as gardening, doing household chores, performing arts and crafts, or reading should only be for their entertainment, insofar as their state of health permits. The incapacitation of the inmates was caused by a judgment of the Royal District Court .

In 1837 and 1838 the institution was expanded with a new building for the mentally ill. A further enlargement of the central building and the addition of two side wings took place after the purchase of the widow Krings' house and garden in 1842 to 1844. In 1846 the neighboring property of Hohmann was added.

In the 1860s, the Departmental Insane Asylum, with the address Rheinwerft at Neustadt 21, was expanded considerably. For this purpose, the board of trustees bought the property from Mathias Krings in 1860 and from Weilinghaus in 1861. In 1863 the property with the house and garden of Hecker on Brückenstraße and of Reusch were added. In February 1864, the women's refuge for the mentally ill was built according to plans by the district architect Karl Westphalen. The total construction costs were 60,762 thalers , to which 1331 thalers were added in 1865 for the construction of a steam boiler. In order to secure the institution against the bank breaking off and to expand its terrain to the west, the so-called fisherman's house, together with the garden and farmland, which lay between the institution and the Rhine, and to enlarge the area of ​​the institution on its south side, the so-called Baasenskaul acquired by the Hüllstrung brothers. In July 1864 a new statute for the institution was decreed by order of the Royal High Presidium of the Rhine Province .

In the mid-1870s, plans for a new building were drawn up with the help of Carl Pelman , director of the Grafenberg Provincial Sanatorium and Nursing Institution , which was newly established in 1876 , the institution doctor Siering and the town builder Eberhard Westhofen , which the Board of Trustees submitted to the Royal Government in 1878 and approved by it . Because, according to the government decree of January 1861, construction plans had to be submitted to the government for all new sick, insane and charitable institutions to be built.

The construction of the men's house on the south-west side began immediately , according to plans by the builder August Rincklake , revised by Westhofen. The building was completed and put into use at the end of 1879. The construction according to plans submitted by Westhofen from 1879 of the central building to administration rooms, kitchen, pantry, work room and administration apartments on the east side; Transverse building between the men's and women's shelter on the west side; Halls on the east side for the stay of the sick in rainy weather, began in 1880 and ended in early 1882. In 1886 a building to accommodate decrepit women was erected northeast of the women's shelter on the site of an obsolete barrack for the use of infectious diseases.

The massive house on Brückenstraße acquired by the Hecker couple in 1863 was preserved and was used to accommodate quiet male mentally ill fosterlings. The house on Tellstrasse 16 (today Wilhelm-Tell-Strasse) was bought to accommodate the line.

In 1886 the city council decided to build a new port in what is now the Hafen district . The first port facilities, with the Petroleumhafen (Berger Hafen) and the customs port below the Departemental Insane Asylum, were opened in May 1896, as was the new railway line along the Stromstrasse for the transport of goods. The end of the 1890s was followed by an extension of the tram from the main station via Haroldstrasse to Stromstrasse and the end point at Zollhof .

In 1902 the institution, with the address Fürstenwallstrasse 1, also became a municipal asylum for the temporary accommodation of the mentally ill in need under the director of Sanitätsrat Heinrich Neuhaus.

Around 1911, the city of Düsseldorf bought the Departmental Insane Asylum. This was closed as a so-called madhouse in 1912 and merged with the Grafenberg Provincial Sanatorium and Nursing Institution, with the so-called incurable patients from the entire Düsseldorf area being assigned to the Bedburg institution in the Kleve district.

Between 1912 and 1914, school classes were temporarily accommodated in the buildings: four classes from the girls 'middle school on Florastraße in 1912, and six surplus classes from the boys' middle school on Luisenstraße 73 , Easter 1914.

During the First World War , part of the graphic collection of the Kunsthalle was housed in the bomb-proof cellar of the former institution . This was not a safe place, however, as nineteen pictures were stolen during a break-in during the rioting in January 1919 . With the growing number of unemployed in Düsseldorf, the "War Support Office" moved from Mühlenstrasse to Fürstenwall 1 in 1919 and was continued there as the "Unemployed Welfare Office" (previously located in Charlottenstrasse 100).

In 1920 the former institution was converted into a municipal orphanage . The cost of the renovation and the facilities amounted to 2 million marks . In the winter of the same year, the renovations were still ongoing, the first children were accepted. The orphans came from the municipal nursing home Ratinger Straße 9/13 and were under the medical care of Arthur Schloßmann . An apprentice hostel for non-resident minors was attached. Since the municipal orphanage could not take in all the children to be looked after by the poor administration - it offered space for a maximum of 400 children - a large part had to be housed in the denominational orphanages. These were the Catholic boys 'orphanage (Oberbilker Allee 157, 159), the Catholic girls' orphanage (Annastraße 62), the Protestant orphanage (Pempelforter Straße 72/74) and other nursing homes in Düsseldorf. In April 1925 the municipal orphanage was closed and a vocational school for crafts with an attached girls' home was set up there. In 1931 there were a housekeeper, a school director, a master carpenter, two master tailors and an architect on site. In 1940, during the Second World War , it was then called the “Master School of German Crafts” and “Commercial Vocational School for Crafts”. The building complex was destroyed with the air raids on Düsseldorf , in particular on the Düsseldorf harbor. Today there is a large lawn here, the so-called Bürgerpark with Rhine Tower , including the southern part of the Rhine bank tunnel .

Description of the plant

Departmental insane asylum in Düsseldorf, Fürstenwall 1
Situation plan of the departmental insane asylum
Ground floor plan

The institution was located in the south-west of the city of Düsseldorf, in the immediate vicinity of the Rhine on a flood-free area. It was surrounded on all sides by public roads: Fürstenwallstraße, Stromstraße, Brückenstraße and Hubertusgasse, the latter no longer by name. Its entire area, enclosed by massive walls, comprised, according to land surveying in 1896, 2 hectares and 22 m × 19 m, of which 50 m × 18 m were built on.

The buildings, all made of solid bricks, consisted of the men's house in the southwest and the women's house in the northeast, both two-story. These were connected to the east by a one-story central building and to the west by a one-story transverse building, the latter with two one-story rear structures. To the southwest of the men's house, there was a smaller, isolated building, which was used for institutional purposes, and to the northeast of the women's house, also isolated, was a brick half-timbered barracks. The machine house was located between the two rear structures of the western transverse structure.

The stairs were made of basalt lava. The corridors and basements, the ground floor of the western transverse building and the kitchen in the central building were vaulted. The floors consisted of cement, clay slabs or plank floors, depending on the purpose of the individual rooms. The roof was made of zinc and the window frames were made of iron.

Between the various buildings there were courtyards and halls for the stay of the sick in the open air, to the east and north of the women's shelter the Bleichen , on the southern part of the asylum area a garden for the administrator and the large vegetable garden of the asylum, the western corner of which was the straw and drying shed as well as the cesspool . The toilet facilities were set up according to the “Heidelberg barrel system” and provided with ventilation openings. Every day the hermetically sealed bins were driven on a rail track to the collecting pit and emptied into the same. The contents of this pit were then removed by the municipal steam latrine cleaning facility.

The men's and women's shelters contained lounges and work rooms on the ground floor and one room each for the permanent watch as well as a toilet that was also accessible from the courtyards ; dormitories on the first and second floors for the quiet and clean sick. In the middle building, the administration rooms, the assistant doctor's apartment, the kitchen and pantries were on the ground floor, the administrator's apartment on the first floor and a hall for the church service above the kitchen. The transverse building and its rear structures contained the washrooms and bathrooms, single rooms, lounges and bedrooms as well as toilets for restless and unclean men and women. The washing device consisted of iron, rotatable wash basins that drained into a drainage channel. For the baths, copper or enamelled sheet steel tubs were used, to which the water heated by steam was fed in adjustable temperature levels.

The residential building, located southwest of the men's house, was inhabited by the gardening workers and also contained separate rooms for men suffering from tuberculosis. The barrack at the women's refuge was intended for decrepit and twenty-one physically ill women, with a bath, toilet and rooms for the individual sick. In the event of an outbreak of epidemics, both should be evacuated and used for the infected sick.

The high and dry basement floors contained workshops, storage rooms and the morgue and dissection room under the men's house. The laundry room with the dryer and disinfection room was located under the women's shelter.

All parts of the institute were connected to the municipal water supply for drinking and industrial water and to the municipal sewer network for industrial water. The heating took place partly through ventilation ovens surrounded by iron mesh baskets, partly through steam- air heating . The lighting was done by gas .

Medical director

  • 1826–1858: Carl Leopold Bournye (1787–1865), Privy Medical Council
  • 1858-1862: Apollo. Schaefer, district physician and secret medical council
  • 1862–1872: Gustav Windscheidt, general practitioner
  • 1872–1884: Carl Andreas Siering, general practitioner, was appointed to the medical council in 1884
  • 1884–1912: Heinrich Neuhaus, Privy Medical Council
  • The district physician Anton Ernsts (1798-1856), who was also a member of the Central-Armen-Verwaltung Düsseldorf, was named as a further director of the institution.

Occupancy frequency

  • 1826: when the institution opened - 14 patients
  • 1830: Increase - 40 fosterlings
  • 1838: after the first extension - 70 nurses
  • 1844: after the second expansion - 110 nurses
  • 1865: after the new women's shelter was built - 261 foster children
  • 1880: after the new building of the men's house - 438 nurses
  • 1882: after the construction of the middle house - 530 nurses
  • 1886: after the barracks were built - 557 nurses
  • 1888–1890: after the new rooms for the unclean and restless - 592 nurses
  • 1897: after the "reform of the insane" reduced - 539 foster children
  • 1905: 514 mentally ill (248 men, 266 women)
  • Early 1906: 510 mentally ill (270 men, 240 women).
  • 1912: When the institution was closed, 430 mentally ill people (225 men, 205 women) were relocated to Bedburg in the Kleve district.

literature

  • The Departmental Insane Asylum in Düsseldorf 1826–1898, Voss & Cie, Düsseldorf, 1898 ( uni-duesseldorf.de )
  • Regulations for the Departemental-Irren-Anstalt zu Düsseldorf , Düsseldorf, 1826 ( zbmed.de )
  • Alma Kreuter: German-speaking neurologists and psychiatrists: A biographical-bibliographical lexicon from the precursors to the middle of the 20th century , Volume 1, Walter de Gruyter, 2013, ISBN 3-110-9616-52 , Bournye p. 172
  • Theobald Géronne (completely revised and supplemented by the end of the year 1888): Overview of the medical u. ordinances issued by public health services , L. Schwann, Düsseldorf, 1890

See also

Web links

  • Designation of institutions in the Rhine Province 1894–1895 (matters of extended poor relief). In the report of the Provincial Committee of the Rhine Province on the results of the provincial administration. II. Affairs of the individual branches of administration. H. Supporting charitable foundations, rescue, idiot and other charities. Pp. 136–141 ( uni-duesseldorf.de )

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ No. 308 Order of contributions for the general poor institution of the mayor's office in Düsseldorf. In the official gazette for the Düsseldorf administrative region. 1820 p. 529 ( uni-duesseldorf.de )
  2. ^ Departmental insane asylum (Rheinwerft an der Neustadt 21.) Curatorium. Mr. Raitz von Frentz, Landrath .; Dr. Shepherd, district physician, medical councilor, doctor of the institution (R.-K. d. K SA-O) Trinkaus, banker. In address book from the government district of Düsseldorf 1861 , p. 4 ( uni-duesseldorf.de )
  3. ↑ Westphalen, Karl, Kreis-Baumeister, Steinweg 225. In the complete address calendar and apartment display of the city of Düsseldorf 1844 , p. 130 ( uni-duesseldorf.de )
  4. ↑ Etymology Kaul: name of the home for mhd. Kūle ("pit", mnd. Kule "pit, depression, hole")
  5. ↑ Theobald Géronne: Overview of the medical u. ordinances issued by the public health system , L. Schwann, 1890. In hospitals e) Department insane asylum in Düsseldorf. Statute of the institution. (Reg.-author. Of July 30, 1864), pp. 349–351 ( uni-duesseldorf.de )
  6. ↑ Theobald Géronne: Overview of the medical u. ordinances issued by public health systems , L. Schwann, 1890. In hospitals . In general. 1) Building plans (Reg.-author. Of Jan. 21, 1861), p. 332 ( uni-duesseldorf.de )
  7. ↑ Tellstrasse 16 (E. Department-Insane Asylum, Fürstenwallstrasse 1) Neuhaus, Heinrich, Dr. med., senior physician, medical adviser. In address book for the municipality of Düsseldorf 1908 , p. 376 ( uni-duesseldorf.de )
  8. ^ In negotiations of the 48th Rhenish Provincial Parliament from March 8 to 14, 1908. Annexes to the minutes of the 48th Rhenish Provincial Parliament. Annex No. 9 , p. 141 ( uni-duesseldorf.de )
  9. ↑ Heiner Fangerau, Karen Nolte (ed.): "Modern" institutional psychiatry in the 19th and 20th centuries , Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006, ISBN 3-515-08805-9 ( Fritz Dross: Anstalten im Anstaltsstaat p. 55 )
  10. ↑ With the dissolution of the Departmental Insane Asylum in Düsseldorf, all the sick people housed there fell to the Bedburg asylum. In the report of the provincial committee of the Rhine province on the results of the provincial administration ( uni-duesseldorf.de )
  11. ^ In the report on the status and administration of the municipal affairs of the city for the period from April 1, 1911 to March 31, 1912 , p. 60 ( uni-duesseldorf.de )
  12. ^ In the report on the status and administration of the municipal affairs of the city in the period from April 1, 1913 to March 31, 1914 , p. 56 ( uni-duesseldorf.de )
  13. ^ In the administrative report of the state capital Düsseldorf from April 1, 1914 to March 31, 1919 , p. 169 ( uni-duesseldorf.de ) and a chronicle of notable events in the administrative years 1914 to 1918 ( uni-duesseldorf.de )
  14. ^ In the administrative report of the state capital Düsseldorf from April 1, 1919 to March 31, 1922 , unemployment welfare. S. 188 ( uni-duesseldorf.de ) and organization of the office. P. 202 ( uni-duesseldorf.de )
  15. ^ Municipal children's nursing home, Ratinger Str. 9/13, prison doctor: Professor Dr. Lockman. In address book for the municipality of Düsseldorf 1920 , p. 46 ( uni-duesseldorf.de )
  16. ↑ Municipal orphanage. Fürstenwall, corner of Stromstrasse. Director: Heinrich Terbrüggen; Institution doctor: Go. Medical Council Prof. Dr. Schloßmann In officially commissioned address book of the city of Düsseldorf 1924 , p. 28 ( uni-duesseldorf.de )
  17. ↑ Municipal orphanage and foster home. In the administrative report of the state capital Düsseldorf from April 1, 1919 to March 31, 1922 p. 177 ( uni-duesseldorf.de ) and p. 304 projects ( uni-duesseldorf.de )
  18. ↑ Closed (institutional) care. In the administrative report of the state capital Düsseldorf from April 1, 1925 to March 31, 1928 , p. 191 ( uni-duesseldorf.de )
  19. ^ Fürstenwall 1 (E Stadt Düsseldorf), girls 'home of the girls' vocational school, Städt. Subject u. Vocational school for craft. In address book for Düsseldorf city and surroundings 1931 , p. 112 ( uni-duesseldorf.de )
  20. ^ Fürstenwall 1, municipal technical and vocational school for crafts and decoration school. In the address book of the city of Düsseldorf 1940 , p. 144 ( uni-duesseldorf.de )
  21. ↑ Heidelberg bin system from 1881: With the help of gravity, the faeces are passed through waste pipes into a collecting container. If this is full, it is exchanged for an empty one and transported away. The downpipes have a water seal (siphon) so that they are connected to the drainage seats and the bin without odor. ( technischesmuseum.at )
  22. ↑ His Majesty the Emperor and King appointed the general practitioner Dr. med. To give Carl Andreas Siering the character of a medical councilor himself. In the official gazette for the administrative district of Düsseldorf 1884 , p. 96 ( uni-duesseldorf.de )
  23. ↑ C. Schultze (Landgerichtsrath in Berlin): Compilation of the partly new aspects for the submission of expert opinions resulting from the civil code for psychiatrists. 1897 ( karger.com )
  24. ^ Düsseldorf, Rhineland: Departemental-Irrenanstalt in Hans Laehr, Heinrich Laehr: The institutions for the mentally ill: In Germany, German-Austria, Switzerland and the Baltic countries , Walter de Gruyter, 2018, ISBN 3-111-4967-40 , Pp. 49-50


Coordinates: 51 ° 13 ′ 0.2 ″  N , 6 ° 45 ′ 46 ″  E