ramirezdahmerbundy:

The Utica Crib was named for the New York State Lunatic Asylum at Utica where it was heavily used in the 19th century to confine patients who refused to stay in their beds. Based on a French design, the structure was modified to incorporated slats and rungs that gave it an appearance similar to a child’s crib. While use of the Utica Crib was widely criticized and infamous among patients, some found it to have important therapeutic value. A patient who slept in the Utica crib for several days commented that he had rested better and found it useful for “all crazy fellows as I, whose spirit is willing, but whose flesh is weak.”

In an opposing view, Daniel Tuke, a noted British alienist (an early term for a psychology expert) writes that, “it inevitably suggests, when occupied, that you are looking at an animal in a cage. At the celebrated Utica Asylum… where a suicidal woman was preserved from harm by this wooden enclosure… Dr. Baker of the New York Retreat allowed himself to be shut up in one of these beds, but preferred not remaining there.”