Modern Inquistion

Modern Inquisition

PICK UP THE PIECES--North 3-1-- Doubleday, Doran ($3). In Grimm's more lurid fairy tales one reads of ogres chopping off legs and arms to make the body fit a pallet. In circles of Dante's Inferno, and in histories of the Spanish Inquisition, are the rack, the wheel, ingenious machines of torture. In Pick Up the Pieces a victim reports the filthy straitjacket, instrument of torture in a modern, real-life insane asylum. North 3-1,--that was the number of his ward in the last institution he attended-- is now a successful publicity director, but he was once a drunkard suffering from delirium tremens with all its accoutrement of weird hallucination. A pest to his family, he voluntarily entered various asylums for "cures," but remained involuntarily. Worst of the lot was the private sanitarium which he entered docilely enough, till he noticed the barred windows and thug-attendants. He thereupon tried to leave, but his board, $40 a week "and extras," was too valuable to the "doctor." Lashed to an iron cot in the canvas sack that was a straitjacket, North 3-1 struggled in vain to escape; and, doped as he was, he did not then feel the cords cutting through flesh to the bone of his arms, his ankles, the back of his neck. Severe infection set in. North 3-1 survived but was badly crippled. The occasional complaint that reached the outside world was promptly explained as insane maundering of an unbalanced mind. For such is the inevitable stranglehold that a keeper has on his charges. Author North 3-1's testimony suggests severe indictment for the private sanitarium carelessly licensed, and of the state hospital crowded heterogeneously with murderers pleading insanity, with bona fide idiots, and with plain drunkards.