The construction and government of lunatic asylums, and hospitals for the insane / By John Conolly.

  • John Conolly
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The construction and government of lunatic asylums, and hospitals for the insane / By John Conolly. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    stances than the curable who are labouring under a recent attack; that the whole character of the life of such incurable patients depends on the manner in which they are treated and taken care of ; that some of them well know the asylum to be their permanent home; and that most of them, so far from requiring fewer, actually require more means of occupation, more space for exercise, greater opportunities of recreation than the curable, and a greater variety of comfortable arrange- ments to reconcile them to their situation, and to maintain that habitual content and tranquillity which distinguish a well-regulated asylum from a miserable madhouse. It must also have been entirely forgotten, that many of the incurable are paralysed and feeble, yet occasionally delirious ; that many are epileptic, and occasionally furious; and that among those who are neither paralysed nor epileptic, and who are generally tranquil and inoffensive, many are yet lable, several times in every year, to attacks of recurrent mania or melancholia, of which the symptoms do not differ in any respect from those in recent and curable cases, and render all the requirements of treatment, and all provisions for superin- tendence, and all precautions for safety, as indispensable as in an asylum containing recent and curable cases alone. The observations made at page 100 of the Report already cited, relative to the necessity of exercise and occupation, and of the services of experienced attendants, even for harmless and incurable lunatics, seem indeed to admit a necessity so positively denied in the same Report, at page 92. But it is greatly to be feared, that an opinion which comes recom- mended by a promise of saving much in the expense of pro- viding for pauper lunatics, will be too readily and generally adopted. Lastly, and more than all, it seems to be forgotten by those who altogether object to County Lunatic Asylums, on account of their expense, either for the incurable or the curable among the insane poor, that those afflicted persons have the double claim upon society arising from poverty and from
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