Make Workhouses And Sanitariums Great Again

After reading that headline, your first question might probably be something along the lines of, “Were workhouses and sanitariums ever, uh, great?” To which I would agree that no, such places — which were common in the western world during the 18th, 19th, and even up to the mid-20th century — certainly weren’t up to our modern standards of sanitation, nutrition, education, and even humane treatment. Certainly, workhouses and sanitariums have a bleak reputation that was well-earned. Consult any historian or read any contemporary account — particularly by author Charles Dickens — of what life was like for inmates and you’ll quickly find that they weren’t places anyone wanted to be, even by the already-low standards of those times. However, while not “great,” per se, they were still a logical, earnest, meaningful way to deal with two societal problems that still plague us to this day — homelessness and severe mental illness (and in too many cases, both in the same people). Two thousand …

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