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.

    190/206 page 178
    —I would say like children; but I ought rather to say like human beings. At the Salpétriére, as at Hanwell, I witnessed the affecting spectacle of a lunatic congregation listening to a sermon. The patients adjourned from the church to the school-room, where the Abbé addressed them in a discourse which lasted about twenty minutes. Everything was done with great simplicity. The patients sat on the benches, the female attendants being scattered among them. The preacher sat at the desk usually occu- pied by the physician, and I was allowed a chair by his side. A few verses of a hymn were sung by the congregation, accompanied on the piano by a patient. The sermon was very plain and clear, and full of kind and hopeful observations. Most of the patients seemed attentive to it: one or two wept, and others endeavoured to console them. One patient alone became restless, said she heard a voice calling to her, and walked quietly out of the chapel.” [The reader who feels a particular interest in this part of the treatment of the insane, will find it very judiciously spoken of in M. Jacobi’s work, already referred to at page 6; and very fully and ably in an account pub- lished by M. Falret of his visit to the Asylum of Illenau.—Visite a U Etablissement d Aliénés d’Illenau, pres Achern, Grand-Duché de Bade. Paris, 1845. In this admirable little work there is not an opinion on the management of the insane which has not my full concurrence, with one exception ;—the humane and excellent M. Falret being still inclined to lend the sanction of his great authority to the occasional use of restraints, and to designate simple seclusion as solitary confinement ; evidently quoting this expression from the Report of the English Commissioners in Lunacy, whose entire misapprehension of the brief and occasional recourse to perfect tranquillity—or seclusion,—as a means of treatment when the brain is actively excited, has misled so many readers, and done such serious prejudice to the progress of the non-restraint system. ] EFFECTS OF THE SEPARATION OF PATIENTS, SUPPOSED TO BE INCURABLE, FROM THE CURABLE PATIENTS. An instructive illustration of the effects of the arbitrary separation of curable and incurable patients, with a view to provide as cheaply as pos- sible for those supposed to be incapable of cure, has been already afforded in Scotland. One hundred and twenty-three unfortunate lunatics were so quietly transported to the island of Arran, from various parishes on the
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