City of cranks

Map of the McLean Insane Asylum from an 1884 atlas of Somerville, Mass. The hospital trustees changed its name to McLean Hospital and moved to bucolic Belmont in 1895. It remains the leading psychiatric hospital in Greater Boston and indeed one of the most distinguished in the world.

“Boston runs to brains as well as to beans and brown bread. But she is cursed with an army of cranks whom nothing short of a straitjacket or a swamp-elm club will ever control.’’

— William Cowper Brann, in The Iconoclast, a Texas paper published in the 1890s.