re: Boardwalk Empire Series Finale (Season 5, Ep 8 "Eldorado")

Mental illness was still looked upon in the same fashion of superstition up through and including that time era. It was also viewed as a defect in character. Thorazine did not appear in this country until the latter 1950s. Oddly, some of these quacks took Freud's "wandering uterus" as being the cause of female hysteria a little too literally. Evidently, this sadistic doc thought that the way to cure or at least treat mental illness in his female patients was to do radical hysterectomies. There was no telling what some of these frickers did to their patients in institutions that frequently physically isolated away from the main population.

As a licensed practitioner for the past 30 years, I really have to wonder if we have made much progress. Granted, we're not dunking patients in ice cold water, doing insulin shock, doing lobotomies, or other such arcane shite. However, we're still using "magic potions" compliments of the pharmaceutical companies, and all too frequently, it doesn't work. For the cases that meds do the trick, those are nice victories for the patient. As modernized as hospitals are in other areas, they still cling to a semi-asylum model. We need the hospitals, but we need a more effective model of treatment, and drugs that are more targeted. We are actually making progress on the latter point. The former? Not so sure. But, I digress.

The "doctor" had removed Gillian's uterus and probably the rest of her female parts, with the exception of the "play pen".