First report of the Durham County Asylum.

  • Durham County Asylum (Sedgefield, England)
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: First report of the Durham County Asylum. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    restraint. We may refer to one instance; a man, handcuffed, and with a policeman on each side, arrived at the neighbouring railway station ; one of the officers of the Asylum happened to arrive by the same train, and as the policemen had taken no care to procure the attendance of a vehicle, offered to drive the patient to the Asylum provided the handcuff's and the policemen were removed; it need scarcely be said that the offer was ac¬ cepted, and that the patient proved a tolerably agreeable travelling com¬ panion. But more prejudicial to the recovery of the patient than either handcuff or straight-jacket is the employment of deceit in bringing patients to the Asylum. In many cases this is done through mistaken kindness, but very frequently also from a desire on the attendants’ part to save them¬ selves from what they may consider unnecessary trouble. That an insane woman should be brought to the Asylum in charge of one man is a prac¬ tice which we cannot believe has the sanction of the guardians; but such is of frequent occurrence. Of the 116 patients admitted (excluding those received on orders of transfer) there can be no hesitation in saying that 54 are incurable; and it is feared that many others whose maladies have been fostered in workhouses may, with propriety, be added to the list. It may be useful here to draw attention to a few of the causes which have left without hope of recovery so many as 50 per cent, of those admitted. The chief cause is the length of time which the legal guardians of the insane have allowed to elapse before sending them to the recognized hospital for treatment. Almost every patient is, previous to admission here, detained in the workhouse for a period varying from a few days to several years, and in several cases the patients have not been sent to the Asylum until every reasonable prospect of recovery has vanished, and until the patients have contracted many bad habits, moral as well as physical. There can be no doubt that the apparent excess of the cost of maintenance in the Asylum over the workhouse influences the guardians in their choice; but this difference is more apparent than real, as we hope to show on a future occasion, and it ought to be borne in mind by the parochial autho¬ rities that the increase of insanity, which has been so much insisted on of late, is to be attributed very much more to the accumulation of incurable persons than to the increased per-centage of recent or acute cases, and that the workhouse system of treating the insane acts prejudicially towards