Derelict healthcare facilities are a way to tour the sometimes disturbing history of American healthcare, according to an article on the Atlas Obscura website.
Inside, they have long, anonymous hallways, studded with small rooms, that open up into the occasional large, sweeping space—the dining halls and rec rooms.
They don't have the restraints and barred rooms of anachronistic psychiatric institutions, but a line of empty wheelchairs and walkers has its own haunting quality.
Part of what makes abandoned asylums so compelling is that advances in medical practices shed a new light on older ideas: what was once acceptable seems cruel and wrong in retrospect, the article said.
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