I go through phases of being extremely disorganized as a blogger. People email me cool tips and sometimes I don’t get to them for a while, and then sometimes I am not sure whether I’ve used them or not. And in the case of this post, someone emailed me all these great photos, which I saved on my computer desktop. But now that I’ve found them, I can’t find the email they came in! If memory serves me, the person who sent them salvaged them from an old asylum that was being torn down, and the notebooks are ledgers recording information about the patients. They are quite fascinating, and rather sad.
If you are the person who sent these to me, please shoot me another message so I can update this post to give you proper credit! Thank you, and my apologies for being such a flake!
[UPDATED: when I originally posted this, I didn’t think there was anything legible enough in the photos to pose a privacy concern, but as a couple of commenters pointed out, there were some names and dates that could be read. I’ve replaced the interior images with edited versions after removing any identifying details.]
  
  
Interesting. Seems they date from 1952 and earlier, which far pre-dates HIPPA. But if the institution was torn down within the last 15 years of so, those records should have been destroyed or properly archived. There is even a name!
The principle of patient confidentiality is much older than HIPPA. It would have been better to block out the names before posting the images here.