History of the Psychopathic Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts / LLoyd Vernon Briggs.

  • L. Vernon Briggs
Date:
1922
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: History of the Psychopathic Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts / LLoyd Vernon Briggs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    sickness. The solitary cell, the noisome atmosphere, and unmitigated cold, and the untempered heat are of themselves sufficient soon to derange every vital function of the body, and this only aggravates the derangement of his mind. Can the reader conceive, after such a report from our legislative body, that it would be nearly one hundred years before Massachusetts ceased sending her insane to prisons and jails instead of to hospitals? The second report of the “Prison Discipline So¬ ciety, issued just prior to 1830, states that there are 30 lunatics in Massachusetts prisons, and says: The sheriff and jailers complained that they were compelled to receive such patients and had no suitable accommodations for them. In one prison where there were ten, one was found in an apartment in which he had been nine years. He had a wreath of rags around his body and another around his neck. This was all his clothing. He had no bed, chair or bench. Two or three rough planks were strewed around the room; a heap of filthy straw, like the nest of swine, was in the corner. He had built a bird’s nest of mud in the iron grate of his den. His wretched apartment was a dark dungeon, having no orifice for the admission of light, heat or air, except the iron door, about two and one-half feet square, opening into it from the prison. The other lunatics in the same prison were scattered in separate cells which were almost dark dungeons. It was difficult, after the door was open, to see them dis¬ tinctly. The ventilation was so incomplete that more than one person on entering them has found the air so fetid as to produce nauseousness and some¬ times vomiting. The old straw on which they were laid and their filthy gar¬ ments were such as to make their insanity more hopeless, and at one time it was not considered within the province of the physician's department to exam¬ ine particularly the condition of the lunatics. In these circumstances any improvement of their minds could hardly be expected. . . . In the prison in which there were six lunatics their condition was less wretched. But they were sometimes an annoyance and sometimes a sport to the convicts, and even the apartment in which the females were confined opened into the yard of the men. . . . In the prison or house of correction, so called, in which were ten lunatics, two were found about seventy years of age, — a male and a female, — in the same apartment of an upper story. The female was lying on a heap of straw under a broken window; the snow in a severe storm was beating through a window and lay upon the straw around her withered body, which was par¬ tially covered with a few filthy and tattered garments. The man was lying in the corner of the room and was in a similar situation except that he was less
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