A photographic journey into 115 years of history inside a 19th-century asylum, this work studies the Northern Michigan Asylum, which was one of the last of nearly 200 such institutions to be built with the aim of integrating beauty and nature as a method to treat patients.

Of particular interest is the hospital's Building 50, a four-block-long structure topped by twelve castlelike spires that is now on the National Registry of Historic Places and is also Save America's Treasures candidate. Kirkbride's architecture conveyed a belief in the healing influence of landscape shared by poets and artists of the nineteenth century. Johnson has captured Kirkbride's spirit of compassion - of angels in the architecture - in a book that conveys the human element of mental illness with beauty and integrity.