Insanity and idiocy in Massachusetts : report of the Commission on Lunacy, 1855 / by Edward Jarvis ; with a critical introduction by Gerald N. Grob.

  • Massachusetts. Commission on Lunacy (1854)
Date:
1971
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Insanity and idiocy in Massachusetts : report of the Commission on Lunacy, 1855 / by Edward Jarvis ; with a critical introduction by Gerald N. Grob. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    [Introduction] 24 the function of a hospital was to provide medical care for groups that could not afford the cost of treatment of an illness of such long duration. The hospital thus fulfilled the humanitarian obligation of society to care for its sick and needy. In the latter case, the hospital provided care for individuals whose diseased mind was a product of their own shortcomings (a view reflected in psychiatric etiological theories). In this sense the justification for its existence was the protection it afforded the community against socially disruptive and threatening behavior on the part of lower-class groups. Consequently, public mental hospitals were often classified, at least in part, in the same general cate- gory as welfare and penal institutions. As such, they tended to receive the same level of funding as these other institutions, thereby undermining their therapeutic and medical roles and reinforcing their custodial function. A brief analysis of the municipal institutions that served the cities of New York and Boston provides convincing evidence of some of these generalizations. By the early nineteenth century New York City had the largest urban population in the United States, including a significant proportion of impoverished immigrant groups. Its citizens were forced to confront a variety of social problems at a relatively early date. Prior to 1839 New York had maintained a lunatic asylum as part of its almshouse and prison complex. Conditions at that time were so depressing that the commissioners charged with responsibility for the insti- tution described it as a witness of the blind infatuation of prejudice and miscalculation; affording to a class more deserving commiseration than any other among the afflicted catalogue of humanity, a miserable refuge in their trials, undeserving the name of an “Asylum,” in these en- lightened days. These apartments, under the best superintendence cannot be made to afford proper accommodations for the inmates, much less can they be so, when (as your Commissioners first saw them,) the same neglect and want of cleanliness witnessed in other parts of the building, was visible here; and a portion of the rooms seemed more like those receptacles of crime, “to whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in,” than tenements prepared for the recipients of an awful visitation of Divine Providence, justly con- sidered the worst “of all the ills that flesh is heir to.””° In 1839 the New York City Lunatic Asylum was separated from the other municipal welfare and penal institutions and given autonomy as a mental hospital. The change in structure, 9 Report of the Commissioners of the Alms House, Bridewell and Penitentiary, New