In A Refuge of Cure or Care: The Sensory Dimensions of Confinement at the Worcester State Hospital for the Insane, Madeline Kearin Ryan analyzes the therapy model of the nineteenth-century asylum. Because the five senses were believed to provide a direct conduit into a person’s mental condition, the curative force of the hospital was thought to reside in its command over sensory experience. Ryan examines how the institution was designed to target each of the five senses as a mode of therapy, and conversely, how that well-intentioned design materialized in the haphazard realm of...