Annual report of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the insane : 1876.

  • Royal Edinburgh Asylum.
Date:
[1877]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annual report of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the insane : 1876. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

    18/70 (page 14)
    murder being usually committed on those nearest and dearest to the unhappy person. Usually such cases occur when a man's brain has been upset by alcoholic poisoning, or when it has been exhausted by. illness, over-work, sleeplessness, or worry, or when a woman, after confinement, or during nursing, has become upset mentally, and has lost the strongest instincts of her nature; not only forgetting her sucking child, but wishing to take away its life. No woman should be allowed the charge of her child who shows signs of becoming insane after confinement or during nursing. Most cases of the disease called General Paralysis require Asylum management, and the sooner the better for them. Where there are unfounded insane suspicions, or hatred of near relatives, the patient needs to be sent away from them, and where can a patient be sent to, if he is not rich, but to an Asylum] The mental disturbance that is sometimes caused by epileptic fits very often indeed requires Asylum treatment, because such patients are dangerous in the extreme; and in any kind of mental disturbance of the circum- stances of the patient, are such, that they manifestly aggravate it; if no proper attendance, or nursing, or food, can be got at home ; if the symptoms threaten to become chronic; if no impression is made on the symptoms by the treatment adopted, then there can be but little question, that in such circumstances Asylum treat- ment is needful. On the other hand, Asylum treatment is usually not needed in the mental disturbances following a drunken bout, or the transitory delirium seen in growing boys and girls, or the milder mental disturbances following childbirth, or in that occur- ring during nursing if plenty of food can be given and the children removed, or in the mere aggravated dotage of old age, or in hysterics, or climacteric disturbances of the milder type; and in fact, in very many other cases where treatment can be adopted in time, and where the symptoms are mild and not dangerous. Our present facilities for travel and change of scene and fresh air are unmixed blessings in the early treatment of mental disorders, helping us to break up morbid ideas and associations before they have taken root, and to restore the normal working of the brain. Those good effects are a clear set-off to some of the evils of our mo- dern restless life, and travelling is now so cheap that a working-man