St. Louis State Hospital: A 150-Year Journey toward Hope

by Amanda Hunyar

“...reveals the compassionate, humorous and not-so-pleasant parts of the hospital’s history, complete with images of nurses’ scrapbooks, photos of the team of mules that helped patients farm the property, and even photos of charred rooms burned by an arsonist patient.” - Valerie Schremp Hahn, St. Louis Post-Dispatch “I’ve loved flipping through the photo-filled pages.” - Steve Patterson, urbanreviewstl.com “Excellent book” - Reader review

Genres: History

160 pages, Hardcover

Published April 15, 2019

Reviews

[Paula Yerke · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have always been intrigued by this building and wondered what stories it could tell. This book was more of a coffee table book than anything else but did relate the changes the building has gone through. What I wanted to hear more about were the patients and what happened to them. The author does have a section on treatments which was interesting but I wanted much more. It still fascinates me.

[Kirsten Benson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this quickly to supplement a book club book. Great photos, but it felt more like a yearbook than an informative account. (Maybe that's on me for expecting the wrong thing here.) The information felt extremely surface level + almost intentionally bland/unobtrusive for an institution with such a long and complicated history.

[Kelsey Gietl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting overview of the hospital with lots of good pictures, but was expecting it to dig deeper into the details of the last 150 years. As other reviews have mentioned, it felt like a coffee table book.

[Joann]

Flashback to my psych nursing rotation along with lots of history.