The fifty-ninth annual report of James Murray's Royal Asylum.

  • James Murray's Royal Asylum for Lunatics
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The fifty-ninth annual report of James Murray's Royal Asylum. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Asylums as Hospitals. The Asylum Stigma. IO very nature of the symptoms. But, on the other hand, delusions and morbid habits of thought, permitting of delay in taking such a dreaded step as admission into an Asylum, are allowed to be so encouraged and so branded on the mind that their eradication is imperfect, if not impossible. There must of necessity be a residuum of unrecovered persons, whose non-recovery cannot be counted a reproach to medicine. It is mani¬ festly impossible that a man whose leg has been shot away can ever again walk on his ten toes ; and similarly it is not to be expected that a man suffering from certain degenerations of the sub¬ stance of the brain will ever again find the organ of mind recover its pristine vigour. It is the endeavour of the medical profession to use the preventive and remedial measures of its art, that this ill-fated residuum may be reduced to a minimum ; and the results of the past year bear out the justice of the foregoing observations, inasmuch as 12 out of 1 7 received at an early stage of their malady have either recovered or are already convalescent. The public Hospitals for the Insane, of which James Murray’s Royal Asylum is a type, are, in extending their lines to include every possible means of medical treatment, educating the public to believe that the aggregation of diseases, which have for their prominent symptom unsoundness of mind, are in the main to be cured, and best cured, in Asylums; and in time, as a consequence, the present undeniable stigma attaching to these Hospitals will be less considered than the absolute welfare of the patient.
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