Twenty-first annual report of the Suffolk Lunatic Asylum : December, 1858.

  • Suffolk Lunatic Asylum
Date:
[1859]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Twenty-first annual report of the Suffolk Lunatic Asylum : December, 1858. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ground of their being very dirty, which however inadequate a substitution for the single plea of insanity, at any rate has the effect of enhancing that one of the most prominent features of this House, its proverbial cleanliness, noticed by visitors, official and non-official. Patients so re-admitted are prone to catch idleness from any near them likely to impart the infection, consequently they become quarrelsome, and to borrow an expressive epithet from one insane reprover of another, they shew spontaneity of violence ; “ you should not be so spontaneously violent,” said one patient to another as he warded off an expected blow. The paramount object to secure is the admission of recent cases, that we may retain if possible, the character of this House as a hospital of cure. Acting always upon the principle that the welfare of the community is the grand argument for individual exertion, it is satisfactory to find many feeble minded patients so willing and desirous even as they are, to enter into the field of competition with those of more energetic character and higher type of brain than themselves, and to know that they are preserved by doing so, from a state of melancholic stagnation. It is of course desirable always to take certain peculiarities of the patients into account with regard to the selection of their employment, and to remember that many are typical characters, representatives of a class in which the best workers are often the most loquacious, incoherent, and eccentric ; wdiose external peculiarities no more interfere with the admirable devotedness of their labours, than the humming does, with the labouriousness of the bee. We had a patient who was ceaselessly engaged, working industriously throughout the six days of the week, but resolutely deter¬ mined to lie in bed on the seventh. He insisted on an elastic interpretation of his own devising, to which we were obliged to yield, to do the same on every alternate Friday; the commandment told him, he said, (and he was deter¬ mined to obey it) to rest every Sunday and every committee
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