"You may not know this, but psychology and psychiatry were very young disciplines," Steve sighed. "When I was a teenager, I heard plenty of horrifying rumors about insane asylums."
"Some were exaggerated rumors, but some really happened. Quite a few asylums in Europe even exhibited psychiatric patients with rare conditions like animals, selling tickets to draw attention."
Steve folded his arms and lowered his head. A conflicted look crossed his face. Stark retracted his armor and walked over to him. When he turned to look at him, he saw Howard's shadow in his expression.
Stark remembered it clearly. Whenever his father was dead drunk and leaning against the lab bench, he had worn that same expression. The golden age of the past that came from his lips always seemed veiled by a gloomy shadow no one could see through.
Steve looked at the light above the emergency room and the shadowy figures visible through the door. As if gathering his courage again, he took a deep breath and said:
"To you, the medical standards of that era might seem absurd, laughable, even as crude as those of cavemen. But if ordinary medical techniques were like cavemen, then treatment for mental illness was like paramecia."
"If someone went mad, they gave him sleeping pills to calm him down. If someone wanted to attack others, they knocked him unconscious and tied him up until he returned to normal. And that was considered the approach of relatively civilized psychiatric hospitals. As for the less civilized ones..."
Steve pursed his lips. He still seemed uncomfortable with exposing the darkness of that bygone era, but he persisted. "If Schiller truly came from the same era as me, then this kind of medical accident was perfectly normal."
"The first doctor had given him too little medication,