When Anna Salzer died while a patient at Rochester State Hospital in 1897, her death was first reported as the result of heart failure after a twelve-hour illness. Later, the cause of death was changed to pneumonia. But another patient, Lydia B. Angier, reported details about Salzer’s death to officials, writing that “every day I saw her abused—shoved about—and on the last day actually kicked.” The incident reveals how abuse contributed to excess mortality among patients confined to insane hospitals at the turn of the twentieth century.
Anna Salzer, a fifty-five-year-old widow and immigrant born in Austria, was also the mother of three children, the youngest aged twenty-one. She arrived at Rochester State Hospital from Waseca County on the same day (June 22, 1897) she was committed, brought by sheriff’s deputy G. Goodspeed and admitted by Dr. R. M. Phelps at 6:45 pm.
According to hospital records, Salzer believed relatives and her physician were trying to poison her. Although she was “disposed to injure others,” she was “not suicidal, filthy or destructive.” After examining her on June 23, Dr. Phelps and his wife, Dr. Sarah Linton Phelps, noted Salzer was complaining “almost constantly” of pain in her back. Nurses perceived that Salzer was physically healthy and active and that she spoke to them in English, but they also noticed that she had vague delusions.
In August, Salzer was moved to a convalescing ward. At first, Dr. Linton Phelps noted that she ate well. Then, on September 5, she reported that Salzer had not eaten in two days, had been fed with a tube, and was “failing.” At 8 am on September 6, Dr. Linton Phelps wrote, “patient died suddenly.”
St. Paul resident Lydia B. Angier was also a patient in Rochester State Hospital in 1897. Angier wrote at least three letters to Agent W. A. Gates of the board of Corrections and Charities, a governing body of the state hospital system. One letter referred to Salzer. On July 19, 1898, Angier described a German-speaking woman who was admitted in June 1897 in good physical health. By September, however, all other patients on the ward who spoke German were gone, and the woman had stopped eating. Angier wrote that “...every day I saw her abused—shoved about—and on the last day actually kicked.” Staff then dragged Salzer “to her bed and left [her] alone to die. She died at seven o’clock next morning. I was with her about ten minutes before she died.”
Angier wrote to Gates that she had told Superintendent Dr. A. F. Kilbourne on November 9 that hospital staff were abusing Salzer in the days prior to her death. “He investigated,” Angier told Gates, “and attendant and Dr. Linton [Phelps] were laid off. Three children to care for—was a good excuse for dismissing Dr. Linton [Phelps].”
There is no evidence that Salzer’s death received further attention from officials within or without the state hospital after 1897. Angier’s allegations of abuse complicate the hospital’s claims to reform in the 1890s, carried out after the 1889 homicide of patient Taylor Combs. In 1909, an independent investigation revealed that hospital staff had been drunk and abusive with patients, leading to the firing of nurses.