Who invented straight jackets

Thus the name, since it is a jacket that joins two arms. This answered a question we were having a discussion about regarding why it's called a straight jacket,when you're arms are not straightened by the garment,but bent.

A weblog to encourage the discussion of psychiatry and history. The facility had beds for 12 patients when it opened. By the end of the next year it housed 22 with applications for 50 more. In , the ratio of patients to physicians was to one. As a result of such conditions, restraints were used longer at Osawatomie than in Kansas' other mental health facilities.

The documented use of straitjackets continued until at least Around , Charles H. Graham, a reporter with the Kansas City Star , wrote a series of articles on the conditions at Kansas' state hospitals. At Osawatomie he found that force was commonly used to restrain male patients, while females wore straitjackets and wrist cuffs. One attendant reported that of the 70 patients on the ward, half might be in straitjackets at any given time. Graham saw no apparent abuse in the women's ward, but described the scene as bedlam:.

There is no place to which any patient can retire to escape momentarily the Bedlamic scene, and as a result, some of them 'blow up.

Graham found it interesting that Osawatomie continued to use restraints while Larned State Hospital, a facility for the criminally insane in western Kansas, had abandoned them by Osawatomie was eventually able to phase out the use of restraints through increasing staff and improving facilities. Advances in psychology, including the development of tranquilizing drugs, made the devices unnecessary.

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The BBC is not responsible for the content of any external sites referenced. View more objects from people in North East Wales. Model made by a German Prisoner-of-War. Why did the one word replace the other?

Or perhaps it was merely that the jacket form of the name made for a snappier, catchier word? Alas, best guesses are all we have here.