10: Canon Triest's legacy
Keep everyone busy arguing about details and no one will notice the big lie
This is the tenth part of a series. You can find part one here.
When Triest died in 1836, the Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary had 12 hospices for incurables, caring for 610 long-term patients, and a 45-bed hospital in Ronse. Shortly after his death, Benedictus De Decker took over the order and worked with Guislain to open a hospital in Lokeren (between Gent and Antwerp) and an insane asylum in Sint-Truiden (and hour south of Geel or east of Brussels). In 1885 the hospital in Lokeren was converted to an asylum for insane girls.
In 1838 the family care system was transferred from church control to the local government, which meant the official implementation of Guislain’s policies. By then there were 700 boarders. In 1838, Guislain published Exposé sur l’État Actuel des Aliénés en Belgique.
“Gheel is a beautiful village, located in the Campine, where, from time immemorial, families, communities, even large cities, our capital, for example, guided by a spirit of economy, send their insane.”
Guislain suggested the creation of provincial asylums, with certain categories of patients to be isolated from the rest: “Among this number are epileptics, the paralyzed, the idiots, most of the demented, and all individuals whose alienation does not prevent them from being affected…at the current moment, an entire population of individuals out of which art can no longer do anything, clogs up our establishments”. Despite the crowded hospices, the total number of insane persons was unknown as there is “a fairly high proportion are boarding-out at rural communes”. He notes that in other countries the incurable are returned to their families.
Guislain proposed that the cost of care of the insane indigent be borne by the provinces, in order to encourage municipalities to send them to asylums.
In 1841 Guislain was appointed to a committee drafting new laws for mental health care by the Minister of Justice. He entered politics in 1848 and retired from his role as a Provincial Councillor in 1854.
King Leopold I made the Triest / Guislain plan for a national asylum system law in 1850,1 which included determining that Geel was legally an asylum. At this point it was enshrined in law that boarding-out was confined to the boundaries of Geel. A key feature of this law was that a doctor could have someone declared mad and committed to an asylum; it was no longer required to go before a judge in court. The creation of a national framework to address lunacy was inspired by the French 1838 Loi Esquirol. The law was revised, with Guislain and Ducpétiaux involved in the process, in 1873. After that, the law stood until 1990.
An Italian historian notes how, as Belgium made dramatic changes to institutions for the mentally ill between 1838 and 1873, they chose to leave Geel – and only Geel – essentially untouched.
Three years before the asylum law, the king had passed a law requiring Belgian towns to develop or sell their wasteland. This included the common heathland the Campine is known for. Major crop failures between 1845 and 1849 left a third of the population of Flanders reliant on poor relief. People living in Flanders moved to Wallonia for work. The number of boarders in Geel continued to grow steadily. In 1852 it was officially made a colony.
The Guislain Hospice opened in Gent in 1857. Those who required treatment or confinement were housed in Gent or the other closed asylums run by the Brothers and Sisters of Charity. Those who were incurable and manageable continued to be sent to Geel.
Guislain continued to build a network of psychiatric centers, run by the orders Triest founded, the Brothers and Sisters of Charity.
Guislain died in 1860. The next year, Baron Jaromir von Mundy of Moravia took up the mantle to champion Geel.2 He outlined his suggestion for care for the incurable in an article titled “The Gheel Question”:
“various cottages should be built on the estate, if there are not enough already present, which should contain the necessary requirements…to every one of these cottages and their inmates land, pasture, cattle, &c., must be given, of which they must take care, and for which they must pay rent to the estate. The steward, on the other hand, would receive pecuniary compensation for his patients...the state must be the purchaser and proprietor of the estate, but the temporal lord of the manor and principal manager of the estate would be the chief physician…such an estate would, if properly managed, be a perpetual patronal lunatic asylum for many States, serviceable for ever.”
Guislain’s Infirmary of the National Colony for Family Nursing in Geel opened in 1863.
Geel’s second medical director, Dr. Jan Frans Bulckens, was chosen by Guislain. He was a close friend of the royal family and the personal doctor of Empress Carlota of Mexico, King Leopold I’s daughter.3 While Esquirol’s account of Geel gathered some attention, it was Bulckens who put Geel on the map internationally.
At the dawn of the 20th century, Geel became the subject of much interest not because of its boarding-out system, which was so common as to barely be worth mentioning, but for its turning a village into a colony of boarders. It was this colonization of the mad that garnered so much interest. Experts debated if the creation of Geel style colonies of the mad in open villages was sufficient or if they needed to be housed in specially created cottage communities and farm colonies. While a few other colonies were created, the vast majority of decision makers opted to instead create closed cottage systems and enclosed farm colonies.
Bulckens was hardly the only ambassador for the colony system. A model house for family treatment was displayed at the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris by Mundy and Jules Duval.4 Since Guislain’s death, Mundy had written his dissertation on the colony of Geel and continued to travel internationally, giving lectures on the Geel system in French, German, and English. Having spent six months in Geel, he was the only one participating in debates on “the Gheel question” who had a deep understanding of how things worked in the Colony, both in theory and actuality.
When Mundy named Geel the oldest, he gave it the appropriate qualifiers: the Colony of Geel was “the oldest systematised method of providing for the insane in private dwellings.”
The asylum Triest and Guislain built in Gent is both a functioning psychiatric hospital and a museum named after Guislain. The museum is run by Triest’s Brothers of Charity and features extensive art galleries showing patient work and a collection of photographs of Geel’s family care system.
Today we’re told Guislain wanted to end the suffering of the mentally ill. In 1838 he wrote:
“Preserving society from the attack of crazy people, that is the goal we have”.
Triest is undergoing the process of beatification. As of 1991, the Brothers and Sisters of Charity continued to run 80% of “Belgian psychiatry.”
The placing of boarders
I wondered why Triest pretended he wasn’t the creator of the foster care system at Geel. I seems odd to instead make claims such as this:
“The system is good, and what proves this is that, notwithstanding the inherent defects of the colony, as originating from the spontaneous commiseration of ignorant peasants, who themselves are the object of speculations of every kind, this method of receiving patients into their houses for a trifling emolument has been advantageous to all parties.”
Triest is given – and took – credit for establishing other institutions. The answer was simple:
“The fact that Gheel has so long existed, and still exists, proved its system to be possible. The colony was not an invention, but a growth, so to say.”
By pretending the system in Geel was ancient, rather than his own invention, he didn’t need to get permission for it or waste time proving that it worked. In order to establish something formally, he would have needed to obtain layers of permission, as he had with other institutions. This was a slow process and impractical during the political upheaval. He had the authority and the resources to enact his vision and then point to it as proof of concept. Any issues could be dismissed as being due to the ancient nature of the system and how badly it needed him to formalize and “modernize” it.
Much of the early criticism of Geel revolved around the lack of a Guislain-style modern hospital and the use of restraints. It’s no surprise that restraints were used after emptying several asylums – which housed only the “raving mad” – into Geel and that restrains would become unnecessary once the “raving mad” were transferred to the newly renovated and newly constructed asylums designed by Guislain and run by Triest’s orders.
Other people in power accepted his story without question. Triest had been a student in Geel in the 1770s, so they believed him when he said there was a colony of boarders there before his time in hiding:
“M. Duval of Paris…observes that the existence of a free colony, dating several centuries back, contains in itself the proof of its rationality.”
For a man who was so well connected, it was easy to get the prefecture of Antwerp to play along. The prefecture said in 1811 that Geel’s colony had existed forever and people have accepted this as fact ever since. The prefecture officially gave oversight of the colony to the man holding Triest’s position. By not naming Triest, Triest and Guislain were in a better position to criticize the care provided in Geel in order to advocate for funding to “reform” the system. Esquirol played along, too, publishing his account of Geel a decade after his visit, and aligning his criticisms with Guislain’s current demands. Esquirol and Guislain agreed that a good building was as good as a good doctor. Triest set the ball rolling. There has been someone to keep pushing it along ever since.
Once again, I discovered I have egg on my face. It’s been right there all along, now that I know what to look for. Geel’s tourism website tells us:
“From the eighteenth century onwards, many sick people were housed directly with the citizens, without the intervention of the canons and without any religious ritual being involved. Private individuals acted as intermediaries and, for a fee, monitored the outsourced patients. In this way, poor management boards of cities and municipalities also had many patients placed in Geel.”
What they don’t say is that prior to 1797 there were no more boarders in Geel than any other village of a similar size.
Despite sources saying the gasthuis in Geel was built to care for pilgrims, it’s clear that the gasthuis is not connected to the Geel family care system. Perhaps the Augustinian nuns running the gasthuis did occasionally organize boarding-out, as religious organizations did throughout Europe. Establishing a colony of boarders in Geel was organized by Triest from Gent, using Triest’s religious orders running hospitals and asylums and Guislain’s connections with prison directors.
Triest was a man who understood how to navigate politics. Not only did he rise to prominence in the hierarchy of the Catholic church, he worked with the Napoleanic, Dutch, and Belgian governments in an era when the activities of religious institutions were tightly controlled. He modeled his first two orders on the existing orders of St. Vincent de Paul – the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul and the Congregation of the Mission – and chose Saint Vincent as their patron saint in a strategic political move.
Triest’s emphasis on the legend of Saint Dymphna and the invention of medieval origins for the family care system was on trend. Romanticism was just entering its peak, emphasizing the nobility of folk customs and celebrating medievalism. Romantic work questioned social conventions and encouraged people to live in harmony with nature.
Why Geel?
After learning about the area, it doesn’t seem obvious that Geel would become the center of family care. Even if Triest was destined to be the man to put family care on the map, why did he choose Geel when there were so many other candidates? Why not Ronse? Why not Sint-Truiden,5 where Triest later ran two asylums?
The easy explanation is that Triest spent his youth in Geel and built a network of connections. Several of his classmates from Geel went on to study with him again at other schools or to be placed in towns near his placements. Triest was a man who seems to have remained in touch with a wide collection of people and to have done quite a bit of traveling, including regular pilgrimages.
When the time was right, Geel was the best place for him to carry out his vision. In Ronse he was in legal trouble and under great scrutiny, which soon led to him being assigned to a different church. Triest didn’t have connections in Sint-Truiden until later on in his career.
Colonial visions
Triest’s plan for Geel was not limited to an ethical way to warehouse incurables. He set out to create an environment that would soothe the troubled minds of the mad. He would provide peasants and boarders with soul purifying work and routine. He would provide orderly housing and bathing facilities. He would render the soil fertile for modern agriculture. He was creating his own biosphere, an imperfect garden of eden for the tainted.
Connolly Norman, writing in 1904 about a visit to Geel quotes the third colony director, Dr Peeters, as he explains how the colonial vision of Geel has come to fruition:
“People not beyond middle age, he further says, can perfectly remember when more than a hectare (about two and a half acres) of the moor used to be sold for five florins.”
He tells us the appearance of the moor had been altogether changed.
“A large number of dwelling-houses, built of brick, clean and wholesome, have replaced the cabins of former times. Many herds of cattle browse upon the rich pastures, a host of peasants till the ground, fertilised by their former labours, and bearing an ample crop of rye, of oats, of potatoes, and even sometimes of wheat. Every year the ceaseless labour of the people of the Campine conquers fresh territories from the heath.”
The wholesome homes built by or funded by the family care program were accompanied by the handsome buildings of Guislain’s hospital and a museum on the Geel family care system.
Upon his return home, Norman began advocating for family care in Ireland.
Another project the Belgian Royals would soon be working on was King Leopold II’s Congo Free State.
“Associated with the Viennese doctor Theodor Billroth, a friend of the same age, [Mundy] founded the Rudolfinerhaus, one of the first secular training centers for caregivers and nurses. But above all, from obtaining his medical degree until his suicide in 1894, Mundy campaigned tirelessly for the reform of the policy of assistance for the insane, proposing the generalization of "open" care centers, the abolition compulsory placement measures, or the placement of patients in rural reception centers, ideas that he developed in psychiatry courses given at the Josephsakademie in Vienna and in numerous other works. It is another event in his biography that must be mentioned here to understand why Mundy, a military doctor, was so interested in the field of mental medicine. We know in fact that his own mother was diagnosed as “mentally ill” and interned around 1850. It was a shock for the baron who then discovered the asylum world and was frightened by the conditions of hospitalization of the insane. Mundy's interest in the cause of the mad is thus anchored in a personal history, the bibliographic data and other available resources allowing us to better understand the complex and passionate nature of his commitment in this field.” https://www.cairn.info/revue-romantisme-2008-3-page-37.htm 40
After ruling Mexico as regent, she suffered a mental breakdown, was declared insane and was held in a Castle. While she was confined, her husband was deposed and executed, making her in-laws her legal guardians. Her return to Belgium was complicated by the guardianship, the fate of her fortune, their keeping her husband’s death a secret, and her paranoia. She was returned to Belgium and lived under confinement in a series of palaces and castles for 48 years until her death in 1927. Her status as Archduchess of Austria protected her during WW2.
Before visiting Geel, Duval was involved in the colonization of Algeria, where he classified the natives and assisted in the project of transforming the desert into fertile fields.
Sint-Truiden is home to Christina the Astonishing, another saint now known for comforting the mentally ill. She’s a better candidate, having undergone an exorcism herself. The New Yorker published a great short story about her in 2017, written from the viewpoint of her sister: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/31/christina-the-astonishing-1150-1224