There's a scene in the finale of The Knick, the Cinemax show about an early-1900s New York hospital, where one of the doctors, Everett Gallinger, enters a room in a mental asylum to which his wife, Eleanor, had recently been committed. He sees something that's possibly even worse than whatever imagery might be conjured by the phrase "early 20th-century insane asylum." Earlier in the season, the couple's baby daughter died.