Twelfth report of the Somerset County Pauper Lunatic Asylum : from 1st January to the end of the year 1859.

  • Somerset County Pauper Lunatic Asylum.
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Twelfth report of the Somerset County Pauper Lunatic Asylum : from 1st January to the end of the year 1859. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    from St. James’s, Westminster, have been removed since the enlargement of the Middlesex asylum at Colney Hatch. Numerous applications have been made, since the opening . of this asylum, by persons of the middle class, for the recep¬ tion of friends unable to pay the charges of private asylums ; and for others possessing small means of their own. By the recent Lunacy Act, facilities are given for receiving this class of patients into County asylums. The Visitors of the Glou¬ cester asylum sometime ago abolished the wards for private patients in their County asylum; and have since provided a separate establishment for their use. There is very little doubt that if a house for private patients should be established by the Visitors in this County, it would soon become self- supporting. Judging from past experience and the slow rate at which provision was made for pauper lunatics, until the law relating to the establishment of County asylums was made compulsory, it is not likely that public asylums for the middle classes will become general, under the present law. The intercourse of private with pauper lunatics in an asylum is not desirable; the private patient becomes discontented, and renders the others so. It may however be assumed that in some few cases, during the acute stage of mania, no inconve¬ nience would be experienced by associating the two classes of buildings, adapted for the residence of idiotic, chronic, and harmless patients, in direct connexion with, or at a convenient distance from, the existing In¬ stitutions. These auxiliary asylums, which should be under the manage¬ ment of the Visitors, would be intermediate between workhouses and the principal curative asylums. Whether or not such additional institutions be provided, we think it essential that Visitors should be invested with full power, by themselves or their medical officers, to visit workhouses, and to order the removal of insane inmates therefrom to asylums at their discretion. [Vide Supplement to the twelfth report of the Commissioners in Lunacy, p. 37. April 1859.]