Fourth annual report of the Manchester Royal Lunatic Hospital, (situate near Cheadle, Cheshire,) for the year June, 1853, to June, 1854.

  • Manchester Royal Lunatic Hospital.
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Fourth annual report of the Manchester Royal Lunatic Hospital, (situate near Cheadle, Cheshire,) for the year June, 1853, to June, 1854. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    There are several reasons which conduce to this unfortunate delay of relatives in placing their friends under treatment. Amongst others may be named the following, namely, their ignorance of what the disease is under which the patient labours, or even that it is a disease at all,—that the manifesta¬ tion of some feeling varying from his usual habits may be ascribed to some annoyance or vexation in the ordinary affairs of life or business,—that even when a suspicion arises in the minds of the relatives that their friend may not be sane, it is accompanied with a hope, a despairing earnest hope, that they may be mistaken, and when this suspicion has, reluctantly, been forced upon their conviction, and become a con¬ firmed fact, they continue to hope that he will yet recover. But without entering further into detail on this subject, I cannot do better than quote a passage from the Eighth Report of the Commissioners in Lunacy, which may tend to remove one ground of prejudice with which we fre¬ quently have to contend:—“ We think it very important that “ Asylums should be, in fact and character, considered and “ managed simply as hospitals for the medical and moral “ treatment of insanity. Residence therein should not be 4‘associated in the minds of the inmates, or their relatives, “with the degrading ideas of criminality or imprisonment. “ All the inmates should be taught to feel that the object of “ their being placed there is recovery from mental disease, “ for which temporary seclusion from general society is one of “the means of treatment.” However desirable it is that this view should be generally adopted, it is to be feared that until the public cease to regard asylums as a species of prison, and believe them to be, what in reality they are, Hospitals, for the proper treatment of an insidious disease, the insane will continue to suffer more or less from the existence of this prejudice, so disastrous in its consequences to the sufferers who labour under this afflicting malady.