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A unique, patient-created, one-of-a-kind embroidery piece is displayed under plexiglass in the Glore Psychiatric Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri, handcrafted on a 1.1 × 0.8-m hospital dish towel, serving as witness to the daily life of an African American woman with a mental illness who rarely spoke. It has been on display since the 1970s (Figure 1 and Figure 2 ).
Estimated to be in her 50s when she created the needlework, the patient was hospitalized at a state hospital in St. Joseph for more than 30 years with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. She was eventually transferred to a nursing home in the early 1970s when her ability to perform activities of daily living significantly declined; she passed away a short time later. Information about this patient's family is unknown.
The patient was encouraged to embroider as a means of therapy, termed industrial therapy at the time, and was given scraps of thread by the hospital staff. She completed this work in the 1960s. With the various colored scraps of thread, the patient painstakingly recorded her thoughts on the dish towel. During her institutionalization, she completed many pieces of embroidery, although this example is the only one known to remain, as the other pieces were disposed of during the cleaning out of accumulated items.
One of the authors (S.J.S.) viewed this piece of needlework when touring the museum and was drawn to the colorful embroidery and intrigued by the patient's attempt to communicate through the embroidered material. Because this document had never been systematically studied, it seemed as though the patient's voice was essentially "silent." The author was interested in analyzing the needlework as an expression of the patient's private thoughts. J.R.B. approached S.J.S. in the fall of 2009 during his freshman year of undergraduate work with an interest in research, and S.J.S. asked J.R.B. if he would be interested in investigating the piece of embroidery. After agreeing on this endeavor, S.J.S. and J.R.B. approached K.N.M., who was in her junior year as an undergraduate student at the time, and asked her to join the team as a third investigator.
The investigators were able to obtain a limited patient history from two individuals: (a) the late Mr. George Glore, an occupational therapist who was...