Restricted accessResearch articleFirst published online 2025
Bridging the gap by microscoping the mind: Mental anthropometry,experimental psychopathology,and the scientific ideal of psychiatry at the Eastern Illinois Hospital for the Insane,1870s–1910s
Drawing on heretofore overlooked archival documents and primary sources, this article reconstructs and contextualizes William O. Krohn’s psychological laboratory at the Eastern Illinois Hospital for the Insane in Kankakee between 1897 and 1899, the first of its kind to be established within a U.S. asylum. Situated against the backdrop of psychiatry’s public crisis of scientific legitimacy in the 1890s and Kankakee’s own history of political upheaval and administrative instability, Krohn’s laboratory represented an early, ambitious attempt to bridge institutional psychiatry and abnormal psychology through experimental psychopathology. Its brief history illuminates both the internal limitations of psychometric psychiatry and the structural and material constraints of the asylum as a site for scientific inquiry, especially when contrasted with the then-emerging psychopathic hospital.
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