Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

by Antonia Hylton

At the same time, a rumor spread rapidly across Anne Arundel County: there was a government-funded gas chamber installed on the grounds of Crownsville Hospital, and in the event of an atomic bomb, the state would exterminate its patients to make room for surviving victims. As frightening and unbelievable as those claims sounded, they were bought and spread far enough that the Washington Post got hold of them. In a story published on May 20, 1951, a reporter found the likely source of the rumor: a Crownsville nurse and first aid instructor named Charles F. Nash. Nash had allegedly been telling students in his class at a church hall in Gambrills, Maryland, that Crownsville patients were going to be “disposed of” and that the gas chamber had been built with funds from Congress. He shocked and horrified his students, one of whom wrote a letter to a local commissioner asking, “Is it true these chambers are for inmates who would be considered undesirable in case of an atomic war? Is it true these chambers hold a thousand persons?”