Annual report of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the insane : For the year 1860.

  • Royal Edinburgh Asylum
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annual report of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the insane : For the year 1860. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    This Table calls for special comment. Of the patients dis¬ charged cured within three months after their admission, 26 in number, six have relapsed, and been sent back to the Asylum within the year. In addition to these, four females, who had been upwards of three months in the Asylum, relapsed, and returned within the year. In other words, of the entire number recovered during last year, one in ten have already relapsed, and been brought back ; and of those discharged cured within three months after their admission, one-fourth, or 25 per cent., have already re¬ lapsed. That is not alb Of those who made a speedy recovery towards the end of the year, and were discharged, it is more than probable from these results, that several more will soon be sent back perhaps, as too often happens, in a more hopeless condition than when first admitted. These results might at first sight be supposed to reflect upon my indiscretion ; but, in point of fact, it is not so. The great ma¬ jority, if not the whole of these early removals, have been due to the indiscretion, importunity, and unreasonableness of relatives. In the case of pauper patients, the relatives find out that, if they remove them from the pauper roll, by undertaking to provide for them, they have the power to remove them, and they insist on doing so, believing, contrary to all representation on my part, that they will keep well. In the case of private patients, I have no power in the matter ; their friends are convinced, or at least in¬ duced by their importunities, to take them out in spite of all risk of a relapse,—the result, in both cases, being too often such as to entail increased expense to Parochial Boards, and increased distress or pecuniary loss to the relatives. I received, during the past year, an intimation from a lawyer that I had no legal right to detain a patient any longer, of whom I ventured to say he was convalescent. I was told that his further detention would certainly make him worse, and his agents appealed to the Commissioners in Lunacy to decide the point. I was, fortunately for the patient’s interest, able to certify, that I still considered him insane under statutory de¬ finition of the disease; and had I not been able to do so, my im¬ pression is, that he would have been taken out with the moral cer-
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