Tales From Fairfield Hills: A Doctor Remembers

By Nancy K. Crevier

(This is the tenth in a series of Tales of Fairfield Hills, stories shared by local residents who worked and lived there when the property was a functioning psychiatric institution. Now owned by the Town of Newtown and being re-created, the property’s past has been the subject of stories, some of which may be tainted with truth, some which may be purely fabrication. These tales, though, come from the hearts of those who knew it best.)

It was a good experience, although somewhat of an unusual experience for a young doctor, said Dr Robert Grossman, who spent more than three decades caring for patients from Fairfield State Hospital (later known as Fairfield Hills Hospital), beginning in 1960.

“Fairfield Hills hired outside doctors to do physicals each year on the patients, so I went up there about two to three times a week, at first,” recalled Dr Grossman. Having just started his private surgical practice on Main Street in Newtown, Dr Grossman found the $25 he earned for three hours of work helpful. “I would see about eight patients per session. We would take blood pressures, check a patient’s heart, lungs, throat, eyes, and ears. We examined the abdomen and the back and the extremities,” he said. Patients with problems were referred on for treatment.

Entry to the wards where the physicals were scheduled meant going through several sets of locked doors. Then, the young doctor frequently found himself alone — unless the patient was female — in the exam room with the patient. “That made me a little uncomfortable, sometimes,” he admitted, but a “hot button” on the telephone called in security if a problem developed. Dr Grossman never had to use it.

“I never had a patient object [to the examination] or strike out. Patients were usually very cooperative,” he said.

In the mid to late 1960s, Dr Grossman began helping orthopedic surgeons at Fairfield Hills do hip nailing surgeries, on broken hips. Then, because he was conveniently located in Newtown, he was asked to do general surgery for Fairfield Hills patients.

Many of the surgeries were emergency situations, Dr Grossman said, because of a phenomenon peculiar to mentally ill patients. “Before the advent of psychotropic drugs, patients seemed unaware of themselves. These patients did not realize they were sick. I would be called in to do surgery, and the patient would be really sick. They wouldn’t complain of pains or symptoms, so until it got really bad, no one knew how ill the patient was,” he said. Surgery for burst appendixes was fairly common, for instance.

“Interestingly,” said Dr Grossman, “because they didn’t know how sick they had been, I found that patients at Fairfield Hills also recovered more quickly than my patients in my private practice. [The Fairfield Hills] patients would just get out of bed and start walking around. No complaining.”

Along with the regular broken hips from falls and appendicitis, Dr Grossman had some patients with odd surgical needs. A frequent surgery candidate was one woman who swallowed bobby pins. “Or she would swallow spoons, or toothpicks. The nurses wouldn’t find out until she started vomiting. I must have operated on her ten times. I’d open up her stomach, take it all out. She was a character. She always swore to me afterward that she wouldn’t do it again. But she was a full time job,” he laughed. The same patient was also known for jabbing herself with bobby pins — not straight pins or safety pins — sometimes embedding them deeply into her arms or abdomen.

“I enjoyed working there, and I enjoyed working with the staff. Dick Eddy was the RN in charge of the operating room, and he would see that I always had any equipment I needed. Rosemary Michalko was the operating room technician who often scrubbed with me. They were very good people,” he said. An anesthesiologist from Bridgeport would come to Fairfield Hills Hospital to assist in the operating room. “You’d get to know each other. Sometimes,” he said, “someone from administration would want to know what was going on, so they would just walk into the room and look over your shoulder. They didn’t scrub up or put on masks, just walked in, even though they all knew the rules.” There were never any infections from those interruptions, though, he added.

Patients, so far as Dr Grossman could tell, were well cared for. “It was a conscientious staff up there. They knew the patients’ names, they knew their idiosyncrasies, and by and large, the patients were cooperative. I think it was because I was a doctor, and they knew I was helping them.”

Working in a different environment than his private practice or Danbury Hospital and working with a different type of patient than he saw the rest of the week was a good experience, Dr Grossman said.

Lobotomies were being performed when Dr Grossman first started working for the state hospital, but it is one surgery he did not perform. “Lobotomy was always considered a questionable practice. People became zombies, with no personalities. It was a sad situation,” he said. Electroshock therapy was another method, prior to the use of drugs, used to calm patients. Again, it was not a practice in which he participated, but he did see patients following treatment sometimes. “People did seem calmer, but many had to have [electroshock therapy] often. I don’t know how much good it did, long term,” he said.

There were many doctors with practices in the center of town, in his early days of practice, Dr Grossman said. It was not that unusual to hear of an “interesting” means of admission to Fairfield State Hospital. “Someone would come into an office and say this person or that person with them is acting crazy, drinking too much, not right, and ask the doctor to sign [admission papers.] Some did it,” he said.

Not all of the patients admitted to the hospital were mentally ill, by modern standards. There were many cases of residents at the hospital who were a bit slow or awkward socially, or families just could not care for them. The family would have the person admitted. “We saw people like that,” Dr Grossman said.

He remembered Fairfield State Hospital as being a place with buildings and grounds well-maintained. “The patients did a lot of the cleaning and mopping, and the raking and grass-cutting outside. The buildings were beautiful then,” he said.

Dr Grossman also remembered when Fairfield Hills had an operational farm. “The mentally capable patients worked the farm. I thought it was a very good thing. It got them out of the hospital, and they had the satisfaction of doing a job well. We were all disappointed when the farm was shut down by the state. It took a lot away from the patients,” he said.

In 1974, a fire destroyed much of Greenwich House, including the operating room. All surgeries after that were performed at Danbury Hospital, he said, where he continued to see Fairfield Hills’ patients, until the state hospital closed in 1995. “I would operate on them there, and then they would stay at Danbury. Security from Fairfield Hills staff had to stay with those patients constantly [during recovery],” he said. Even until he retired from surgery in 2002, said Dr Grossman, he would occasionally find himself operating on a former State Hospital patient.

“Some of them were doing very well. Some, were not,” he said.

It was a mistake, closing Fairfield Hills Hospital, Dr Grossman said, with many patients unable to care for themselves. “There were patients on psychotropic drugs who functioned well in that particular setting, but couldn’t function in the outside world. They had no one supervising them or making sure they were taking their medications properly. There were a lot of arrests for disorderly conduct,” he said. Subsequently, the number of homeless people in the area increased.

“In the 1960s and ’70s, you didn’t hear about homeless people, but when [Fairfield Hills Hospital] closed, you started seeing a lot of homeless people, especially in the bigger cities. A lot of them returned to the cities they had come from, but they couldn’t hold jobs or take care of themselves,” Dr Grossman said.

He said, “It was a common opinion among physicians that the closing of the mental institution was a mistake. We felt the state was shirking its responsibility in caring for these people,” he said. He would have liked to have seen Fairfield Hills Hospital remain in some capacity to care for those patients unable to care for themselves.

“I liked working for Fairfield Hills Hospital,” Dr Grossman said. “I like knowing I was able to give good care to people who needed it. That’s why I continued to do it.”