The history of the first inebriate asylum in the world / by its founder [Jonathan Edward Turner]. An account of his indictment, also a sketch of the Woman's national hospital, by its founder.

  • Turner, J. Edward, 1822-1889.
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The history of the first inebriate asylum in the world / by its founder [Jonathan Edward Turner]. An account of his indictment, also a sketch of the Woman's national hospital, by its founder. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    71/512 (page 67)
    of dniukeiiness. How pitiful are the lui.sfortunes—certainly as tliecriiiies—of him on whom this leprosy has fastened! and for those with whom he is connected—his wife, his children, his parents. Is the old ^yzentian cruelty, which bound the loathsome corpse face to face with the living-, more frightful than the fate of the drunkard’s kindred and friends? Hut now, how has Society treated the drunkard? She has either let him alone or immured him in prisons and jails. She has been compelled to do the last for her own preserva- tion; for drunkenness is the matrix of crime and injury, the devourerof public wealth and safety, the serpent that tempts murder, and arson, and lust, and theft, and every other crime and vice, to its daily iniquity. But do we not do a serious violence to the moral sense of the communitj by this confound- ing of weakness with malignity, of vice with crime ? Everybody knows and feels that a druidvard, though quite as dangerous as a murderer, and perhaps the cause of as much loss of life, is not deserving of a murderer’s fate; that vice ought not to be treated as a crime. Every time a man suffers for crime committed in drunkenness the conscience and humanity of the ]iublic are shocked as much as though insanity was treated as crime, as it so long was. The enlightened con- science of the world demanded the separation of insanity and crime; it now demands the separation of drunkenness and crime. They must both be restrained, but in distinct ways and for separate ends. Drunkenness needs to be restrained a thousand times as much as it is, but it never can be, so long as the criminal police are its controllers, and the jail its house of correction. So long it will lie corroding in the homes of the land, eating out the vitals of families; wives, sisters chil- dren, wearing out their hearts in concealing, protecting, and restraining it. Alas! the sum of misei-y which the unpro’ uded means of society for the conhnement and correction of drunkejmess occasions is past all telling. There is hardly a man or woman present that does not know this from experi- ence they would shudder to relate. I ha ve seen the day when I would have given the results of a year’s labor for a month’s ap]>ro])riate shelter and skillful care of an inebriate fi-iend. And such friends as one sees ho])elessly in the gi*as]i of this vice! the gifted, the tender-hearted, the sinq)le-minded, the