Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The moral treatment of the insane : a lecture / by W.A.F. Browne. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![with a door at every two or three yards. Your conductor was stern and surly; he carried—fit accompaniments—a whi]) and a bunch of kevs. The first room you examined might measure 12 by 7, with a window, placed near the ceiling, which did not open, and without a fireplace, or means for artificial heating, and without fin-niture. Ten females, perhaps, witb. no other covering than a rag round the waist, were chained to the wall; loathsome and hideous, yet when addressed evi- dently retaining some of the intelligence and much of the feehng whicli in other days may have ennobled their nature. In shame or sorrow- one of them might utter a cry. A blow, which brought the blood from the temple, the tear from the eye, and which often ended in death; or an additional chain, a gag, an indecent or contemptuous expression, produced silence. And if you asked where these creatures slept you were perhaps led to a kennel, eight feet square, with an unglazed au'hole eiglit inches in diameter. Here five might be crowded ox piled together,—the violent witlr the timid, the dehcate with those of debased habits. Here they were strapped down to their beds, lashed, mufiled, and forgotten from Saturday night till Monday morning. In such a situation my friend, Sir A. HaUiday, saw a rat devouring the extremities of a maniac, lying naked upon some straw, in the agonies of death. The floor was covered, the walls bedaubed, with filth and excrement; no bedding but wet and decayed straw was allowed, and the lair of the wild beast is more homehke.— Each of the sombre colours of this picture is a fact, witnessed by myseK or by those who have acted with me. This brutality was the shadow of fear; but it sought its justification in a sort of barbarous moral treatment. Cruelty, and chainiugs, and drownings, and rigid confinement, were resorted to, not so much be- cause the guardians were inhumane or unsympathising, but to quench the spirit, to frighten men into their senses, to subdue and train, to overcome and tame the passions. That such effects might follow need not be questioned. The manacled, half-starved, half-suffocated victim, might rise from the ordeal a wiser, as well as a sadder man ! But generally the spirit must have been broken, extinguished; the senses scattered and mystified by multiplied delusions, and, the iron entering into the soul, must have urged the jjassions to the wildest fui-y and ferocity; and subordination must have ofteii merged into apathy or indifference, or the dull, drivelling tameness of dementia. We shall say little more of what is worthy of being called Immoral Treatment, there are now, fortunately, fewer such savage natures to overmaster. Whatever may be decided as to the change in the type of pneumonia and sthenic diseases generally, there cannot be a doubt that mania furibunda has almost disappeared witlun the last torty years; that the mania attended by violence is of much less frequent occurrence; and that all forms of insanity present a diflercnt and a milder type. This consideration must be taken into account in](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21940113_0006.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
