Twenty-first annual report of the trustees of the State Lunatic Hospital at Worcester. December, 1853.

  • State Lunatic Hospital at Worcester
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Twenty-first annual report of the trustees of the State Lunatic Hospital at Worcester. December, 1853. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    V I peculiar. In the meantime, many of its reforms have been copied, and have received the sanction of experience. The means of restraint, generally, have been greatly improved, and the practice relaxed, or discarded. The brick and mortar cells with iron doors, or dungeons, as they may with propriety be called, for locking up the violent, noisy, or indecent, are no¬ where to be found in any recent structure, except at Taunton, There is not such a cell to be found in either of the public establishments of the great States of New York, or Pennsyl¬ vania, nor in the New Jersey State Lunatic Hospital, the de¬ sign of which is quite generally regarded as a model. With the view of examining into this subject, and the general management of Lunatic Hospitals, together with the best modes of warming and ventilating them,-—a subject but very little understood at the time the one at Worcester was built, and quite imperfectly, we fear, comprehended at present,-—it was deemed expedient that so many of the Trustees, with the Superintendent, as should find it convenient, should make a tour of observation of the institutions of other States. When the time fixed upon for starting arrived, Dr. Chand¬ ler was detained by a summons to court as a witness in a capital trial, Dr. Howe was detained by sickness, and Mr. Newton declined going. These facts were learned after the other members of the Board had arrived in New Y'ork. After examining the institutions in the city and its vicinity, Mr. Rip¬ ley returned to Massachusetts, the other members of the Board continuing on through New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Western New York. Our thanks are due to the officials of the twenty-six institu¬ tions visited by us, for the perfect cordiality with which we were everywhere received. Of these institutions, ten of them were Lunatic Plospitals. In each and all of them, every facil¬ ity was extended for the most full and thorough observation. The Superintendents of the Lunatic Hospitals laid us under particular obligations, for their generous courtesy, and the very frank and unreserved manner in which they exhibited their respective establishments, together with their methods of man¬ agement and modes of treatment; pointing out improvements and criticizing defects. But one spirit was manifested by them, that of doing what they could to impart information
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