In this episode Matt Crawford talks to Stacy Horn about her new book Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad & Criminal in 19th-Century New York. Known today as Roosevelt Island, Blackwell's Island in the early 19th century was home to an insane asylum, two prisons, an almshouse and a number of hospitals. The atrocities that took place here were unimaginable and yet Stacy Horn writes of it in a way that echoes in the present. A non-fiction book that reads as fiction truly must be read to be believed.