DOI: 10.15139/s3/gtcnt3
title: Dorothea Dix Hospital Records Collection, 1856-1919
title: Admissions Ledgers, General Case Books, and Medical Meeting Minutes

description: &lt;i&gt;These record collections are not available because they are being updated. The original documents on which these collections are based are held by the State Archive of NC and are publicly available.&lt;/i&gt;
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This collection contains photos of the original, handwritten admissions ledgers (1856-1920--), general case histories (1887-1920--), and typescripts of medical staff meetings (1916-1917) held at the State Archives of North Carolina. All these records are publicly available under the North Carolina Public Records Act, which provides that state records created at least 100 years ago may be accessed and copied by the public. The admissions ledgers (Vols 1, 2, and 3), General Case Books (Vols 13-32), and Medical Meeting Minutes (Vol 9) were originally the property of Dorothea Dix Hospital (1959), also known as the North Carolina Asylum for the Insane (1856), the North Carolina Insane Asylum (1879), the Central Hospital for the Insane (1897), and the State Hospital at Raleigh (1899). 
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As per historical finding aid at the State Archives of North Carolina (1977), an admissions log (aka admissions ledger) was maintained from the opening of the hospital in 1856 to 1937 (Vol. 1: 1856-1911; Vol. 2: 1911-1929; Vol. 3: 1929-1937). For the period relevant here (1856-1920), this was a hand-written ledger recording both the admission (with identifying admissions number) and disposition (discharged, transferred, escaped [eloped], death) of each patient—more than 7200 admissions. The ledgers are organized as a 19th century version of a modern spreadsheet: each row is a patient, and each column an attribute. Information about each patient includes gender, age, marital status, county of residence, “supposed cause” of admission, form (diagnosis), and condition at discharge. A “free text” field provides cause of death and, in some cases, purported hereditary links.
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In 2017-18, these records were photographed by the Community Histories Workshop and transcribed by undergraduate research fellows of the CHW, under the supervision of Sarah Almond, Assistant Director of the CHW (2018-20). A database was created from the records, providing the first alphabetical index for patients admitted at least 100 years ago. For further information on the dataset created from these records, see Dix Hospital Admissions Ledger Dataset, Patients 0000-7827 (https://doi.org/10.15139/S3/LNTB9R).
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As per the historical finding aid at the State Archives of North Carolina (1977): 
&lt;br&gt;&lt;/br&gt;General Case Books (1887-1920, Vols 13-32) are large format (11”x14”) printed intake forms created upon admission of a patient to the hospital. They contain information about patients unavailable in any other record collection: family history, personal and and medical history, results of a physical examination, and symptomatic expressions (manifestations) of the “supposed cause” of admission. For the first years these records were kept, there are also treatment notes, some of them quite extensive. However, such notes were kept only sporadically after the early 1890s. 
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Staff Clinical Notes (1916-1917, Vol 9) are typed minutes of regular (sometimes daily) meetings of the hospital’s medical staff photographed from the original typescript held by the State Archives of North Carolina. Meetings begin with discussion of operational matters, including staffing, deaths and sicknesses, escapes (elopements), and contagious diseases present in the hospital. They also reveal journal articles being read by the staff from the hospital’s library, many of the from the American Journal of Insanity. They conclude with unredacted transcripts of brief interviews with recently admitted patients, intended to confirm or (much less frequently) contest provisional diagnoses made at the time of admission. In some cases, interviews were used to determine suitability for outright or provisional discharge. 
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The General Case Books have not been transcribed, nor have redacted versions been prepared. The typescript Clinical Staff Notes were scanned as PDFs by SANC. They are unredacted and contain both patient names and admission numbers.
description: The admissions ledgers (Vols 1 and 2), General Case Books (Vols 13-32), and Medical Meeting Minutes (Vol 9) were originally the property of Dorothea Dix Hospital (1959), also known as the North Carolina Asylum for the Insane (1856), the North Carolina Insane Asylum (1879), the Central Hospital for the Insane (1897), and the State Hospital at Raleigh (1899).
description: This collection is restricted due to the presence of identifying personal health information. See Terms section for data access information. The original ledgers, general case books, and medical meeting minutes are available at the State Archives of North Carolina.