Vox Humana: The Story of the State Hospital Pipe Organ

They called it “the singing hospital” — where a thousand patients dined beneath gilded organ pipes, and a murderer known as the Mad Houdini plotted his revenge. In 1926, at Rhode Island’s Asylum for the Insane, Dr. Arthur Harrington defied psychiatric orthodoxy by installing a majestic pipe organ where others used restraints. In the end, his grand instrument would stand as both salvation and requiem. Drawing on lost archives, Vox Humana excavates this shadow history of early psychiatry, including Harrington’s final work, “Everlasting Life” — completed the night he died at his piano, his radical experiment in music therapy still unproven.