Observations on the admission of medical pupils to the wards of Bethlem Hospital, for the purpose of studying mental diseases / by John Webster.

Date:
1842
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on the admission of medical pupils to the wards of Bethlem Hospital, for the purpose of studying mental diseases / by John Webster. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    as Apothecaries, or Assistants to the Physician ; who will thus have the inestimable advantage of living among the insane ; of watching and becoming accustomed to their habits of thinking and acting; of performing every office which kindness dictates, or the treatment demands ; and of observing all modifications of mental disease, and the means of alleviation employed. For obvious reasons, the whole of an Asylum cannot be thrown open to all students indiscriminately, however desirable in some re- spects such an innovation might be ; and these Assistants are accordingly required to have received some instruc- tions in medicine previous to their appointment, to be articled pupils of the Superintendent, and to be members of the Household.” Besides these examples, the present eminent resident Physician of the Middlesex County Lunatic Asylum, Dr. Conolly, has recently, and since the first edition of these Observations appeared, delivered gratuitously a course of lectures on mental diseases, to medical pupils from the different London hospitals. This important step in medical education must be of much advantage to the younger members of the medical profession, and constitutes almost a new epoch in the management of the Metropolitan Lunatic Asylums. Such a course of instruction makes these useful institutions, in addition to their present pur- poses, conducive to the advancement of knowledge res- pecting a disease of very great interest to all who are engaged in the study and practice of medicine, and is both highly creditable to Dr. Conolly, and to the visiting jus- tices sanctioning it, and affords an important practical illus- tration of the principles enforced in the previous obser- vations. And although the distance from town must always be an impediment to the attendance of pupils at that institution, nevertheless, the opportunity thus liberally afforded to young men of obtaining useful information, on the curative treatment of insanity is most valuable, anti forms an excellent beginning in the course of improvement. The example now set at Harwell ought to be followed at other public charities for the reception of lunatics ; and were the wards of Bethlem and St. Luke’s Hospitals opened to the admission of medical pupils, at a moderate fee, and lectures, with clinical instruction given, the objects contemplated in these pages would be amply accomplished. The improved modes of treatment recently pursued in these extensive insane establishments would thus be made more generally known than at present, and old preju-
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