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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    moved toward further centralization in order to make the seem- ingly chaotic welfare system function more efficiently. The new Board of State Charities, though not possessing in its early days much substantive authority, nevertheless had the potential for growth—a potential that would be more than fulfilled during the next century. While its activities encompassed a variety of problems, the Board—precisely because mental hospitals came under its jurisdiction—tended to reinforce the growing identi- fication of poverty, welfare, and mental illness. It linked from time to time illness and poverty with immoral behavior on the part of the individual. “There is a grain of truth,” the Board wrote in 1868, “under the harsh expression that ‘sick men are rascals’; for many are sick in body and sick in mind, not because nature makes them so, [but] because they make themselves sick or insane by persisting in courses which plainly lead to sickness and to insanity.” 44 Other states quickly followed the lead of Massachusetts in establishing central agencies vested with the responsibility of overseeing public welfare institutions and developing uniform policies to promote efficiency. Most of these agencies had au- thority over the operations of state mental hospitals as well as other institutions caring for various indigent groups. From the very beginning of the movement to rationalize welfare, then, the state mental hospital was considered to be as much an institu- tion for poor and indigent groups as it was a medical facility. The relationship between pauperism and mental illness was further reinforced by the manner in which most state boards of charities approached the problems of indigency, illness, and welfare. In general, their members (who shared the traditional American ambivalence toward poverty and a feeling that the cure for poverty lay in the inculcation of proper attitudes on the part of the individual) often related crime, indolence, alcohol- ism, vagrancy, and poverty with mental illness. This is not to imply that the latter was considered to be a consequence of the former. Nevertheless, the general framework established by the words and deeds of state boards was such as to link in the mind of the public a relationship between poverty and mental trader, and mechanic—must the larger class of the respectable and deserving poor be deprived of the privileges they are taxed to pay for, and subjected to associations and influences which necessity itself could hardly excuse, simply to gratify a sentiment?” /bid., 1863, Massachusetts Public Document No. 15 (1863), 17-18. 44 Massachusetts Board of State Charities, Annual Report, 5 (1868), Ixxviil.