Thirty-first annual report of the directors of James Murray's Royal Asylum for Lunatics, near Perth. June 1858.

  • James Murray's Royal Asylum for Lunatics
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Thirty-first annual report of the directors of James Murray's Royal Asylum for Lunatics, near Perth. June 1858. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    jegal estrictiona n marriages >f the Insane elibacy as a luse of insanity. ] I f i i hacl just committed suicide, on being told that, in consequence of his father’s approaching death, he would be compelled to work. A daughter had just come home to this scene of misery to be confined of an illegitimate child ; while the mother was rushing from room to room, raving mad, and unable to comprehend the scene in which she was so prominent an actor. But, strange to say, similar marriages are sometimes deliberately solemnised among the educated and higher classes of society, when both parties have their eyes open. Such mesalliances are, however, much less seldom marriages of love than of convenience: there is probably, in general, money to be got on one or other side. The parties entering into such compacts are inexcusable on the plea of ignorance of the fearful results of such mal-assorted and unnatural unions. It is a delicate and difficult thing to interfere with civil liberty ; but it admits of a reasonable degree of doubt whether there should not be some legal restriction in regard to such marriages. Their effects are most disastrous to society at large; and surely society, which bears the burden and suffers the penalty, has a right to enter some species of practical protest against proceedings, which are contrary to physiological, as well as to moral, law. The propagation of insanity by means of fatuous and facile female paupers is now amenable to civil law. This subject we may safely leave in the hands of the new Lunacy Board. Such females are comparatively seldom married : their lives are too frequently of the most irregular and dissolute character. More than one deplorable instance has occurred to our notice during the year. We are naturally led from the subject of marriages among the insane to consider celibacy as a predisposing cause of Insanity. Of 69 admissions during the past year, 49 patients have been unmarried, 17 married, and 3 widowed ; or, in other words, the single have been considerably more than double the number of the married. But as the statistics of a single year may exhibit somewhat unusual or falla¬ cious results, we have examined our statistics, bearing on this subject, for the last 31 years; and we find, as the result, that of a total of 679 cases, in which the social condition has been specially noted, 44-5 have been single, 196 married, and 38 widowed : that is, the single have constituted 65’54 per cent., and the married and widowed