Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge to create the administration building. “Always buy the best” was the watchword of Boston’s blue-blooded dowagers, and their husbands followed suit. The burnished-copper rain gutters still hang from the marble cornices of North and South Belknap Halls. Roofs were copper or slate, never shingle. Every patient’s room had a fireplace, ample closet space, bath, and toilet. The second hall built for men, Upham Memorial Hall, was larger than many hotels but accommodated only nine patients, each in a luxury suite with a sitting room. In every ward, the rooms were soundproofed with layers of plaster inserted in between upper and lower flooring. There would be no patients loitering aimlessly in corridors. “These corridors are not used as parlors,” Hurd wrote, “but serve only as passages to parlors of good size, which are sunny corner rooms in almost all cases. It is everywhere sought to obtain a domestic style of construction and homelike effects.”
What was life like at McLean at the beginning of the century? The neatest portrait of the new Belmont hospital emerges from the pen of Earl Bond, a twenty-nine-year-old medical school graduate who took a job as “junior assistant physician” at the newly landscaped facility in the summer of 1908. Bond went on to enjoy a distinguished career in psychiatry, both as an officer of the American Psychiatric Association and as an administrator and doctor at the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. His son Douglas and grandson Thomas both became psychiatrists; Thomas was an attending physician in Belmont for eighteen years. After his retirement at the age of eighty-three, Earl
Bond started work on a memoir of his psychiatric career, beginning with his halcyon years at McLean. When Bond wrote about the hospital, he have might been describing a secluded village or a baronial ski resort:
The road to the hospital climbed a steep hill until it reached the lower side of a long, open plateau and then followed the edge of the grassy field to the administration building.... The porches and windows of this building gave unobstructed views of several miles of the countryside to the west. Trees shut out views to the East and South and the little town of Waverley lay hidden behind a shoulder of the hill.
Fifty years after leaving the campus, Bond still remembered the large, indoor gymnasium, the two tennis courts, and the “rough and ready golf course” with its final, ninth green terraced right in front of the administration building. (The seldom-inspected cup at the little-used ninth hole was a favorite dope stash for the 1960s generation.) But even this description understates the recreational facilities. The new hospital had two indoor gymnasiums, one for men and one for women, each with its own billiard room and bowling alley.
The new McLean had beds for 100 male and 120 female patients. They were attended by three doctors, including the superintendent George Tuttle, and by three assistants like Bond. For most of the century, the campus would be split along north-south and male-female lines, the “Men’s Division” occupying the northern tier and the “Women’s Division” the south. The nurses were mainly women; because of a local labor shortage, many of them were recruited from high schools in Maine and Nova Scotia. The first female physician would not appear on the grounds until shortly before World War II. Because of a resignation, Bond quickly became chief of the Men’s Division, and he visited each male patient every day. Twice a week he joined the grand tour of the hospital with Tuttle and the other doctors, who looked in on all the patients.
The ever-cheerful Bond clearly enjoyed his five-year-long stay at McLean. He and his new bride moved into a newly purchased, white clapboard farmhouse near the Mill Street gate, and he whiled away his leisure hours playing first base on the softball team alongside the burly male ward
What was life like at McLean at the beginning of the century? The neatest portrait of the new Belmont hospital emerges from the pen of Earl Bond, a twenty-nine-year-old medical school graduate who took a job as “junior assistant physician” at the newly landscaped facility in the summer of 1908. Bond went on to enjoy a distinguished career in psychiatry, both as an officer of the American Psychiatric Association and as an administrator and doctor at the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. His son Douglas and grandson Thomas both became psychiatrists; Thomas was an attending physician in Belmont for eighteen years. After his retirement at the age of eighty-three, Earl
Bond started work on a memoir of his psychiatric career, beginning with his halcyon years at McLean. When Bond wrote about the hospital, he have might been describing a secluded village or a baronial ski resort:
The road to the hospital climbed a steep hill until it reached the lower side of a long, open plateau and then followed the edge of the grassy field to the administration building.... The porches and windows of this building gave unobstructed views of several miles of the countryside to the west. Trees shut out views to the East and South and the little town of Waverley lay hidden behind a shoulder of the hill.
Fifty years after leaving the campus, Bond still remembered the large, indoor gymnasium, the two tennis courts, and the “rough and ready golf course” with its final, ninth green terraced right in front of the administration building. (The seldom-inspected cup at the little-used ninth hole was a favorite dope stash for the 1960s generation.) But even this description understates the recreational facilities. The new hospital had two indoor gymnasiums, one for men and one for women, each with its own billiard room and bowling alley.
The new McLean had beds for 100 male and 120 female patients. They were attended by three doctors, including the superintendent George Tuttle, and by three assistants like Bond. For most of the century, the campus would be split along north-south and male-female lines, the “Men’s Division” occupying the northern tier and the “Women’s Division” the south. The nurses were mainly women; because of a local labor shortage, many of them were recruited from high schools in Maine and Nova Scotia. The first female physician would not appear on the grounds until shortly before World War II. Because of a resignation, Bond quickly became chief of the Men’s Division, and he visited each male patient every day. Twice a week he joined the grand tour of the hospital with Tuttle and the other doctors, who looked in on all the patients.
The ever-cheerful Bond clearly enjoyed his five-year-long stay at McLean. He and his new bride moved into a newly purchased, white clapboard farmhouse near the Mill Street gate, and he whiled away his leisure hours playing first base on the softball team alongside the burly male ward
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