author
Moses Swan
b. 1812
Known for a rare first-person account of 19th-century psychiatric confinement, this American writer turned personal suffering into a forceful public testimony. His surviving book offers a direct, unsettling view of asylum life and the treatment of patients in his time.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born in 1812, Moses Swan is remembered for Ten Years and Ten Months in Lunatic Asylums in Different States, published in Hoosick Falls, New York, in 1874. The book is a personal narrative drawn from his long confinement in several institutions, and it has endured as a striking historical witness to mental health care in 19th-century America.
Swan wrote in a plain, urgent voice, describing not only his own experience but also the systems of restraint, authority, and everyday life he encountered inside asylums. That combination of memoir and social criticism makes his work valuable both as literature of lived experience and as a document of medical and social history.
Some historical collections list him as living from 1812 to 1889. Even though little biographical detail is easy to confirm, his book continues to stand out because it preserves a perspective that was rarely published in his era: that of a patient speaking for himself.