The curability of insanity : a series of studies.

  • Pliny Earle
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The curability of insanity : a series of studies. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    only $6,540,066. On the contrary, had all these patients been placed in poor-houses, where it is assumed that seven per cent, of them would recover, the cost of support, during life, would have been $11,271,932. This, says the writer, shows a clear saving of $4,731,866. He then proceeds to show that, if the seventy-five per cent. had been cured, their earnings would have amounted to $4,945,000 more than they would if only seven per cent, had been cured. Adding these sums he obtains a total of $9,676,866, a gain, he says, of that much to the wealth and power of the community. Having completed the calculation, he says, we urge a very careful attention to, and also criticism of the above demonstration. But a few months have elapsed since, in an official report of the Commissioner of Insanity in Vermont, it was alleged, as a condemnatory fact against the hospital for the insane of that State, that the proportion of re- coveries among the patients has recently been less than it was in the earlier history of that institution. In view of this allegation, and of the main proposition of the foregoing paragraph, it has appeared to me that a re- view of the subject of the curability of insanity might not be wholly useless at the present time. The demonstration, a criticism of which is invited by the Board of Public Charities of Pennsylvania, will not suffer, as an intellectual process, either in its logic or its mathematics, from the closest scrutiny. The serious question in regard to it is, are the elements of the calculation true ? If either of them be false, the de- duction from them cannot be otherwise than untrue. Although not directly so stated, it is evident that the seventy-five per cent, of assumed curables relates to
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