Sussex County Lunatic Asylum Haywards Heath annual report : 1889

  • Great Britain. Sussex County Lunatic Asylum
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sussex County Lunatic Asylum Haywards Heath annual report : 1889. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    reviewing the causes of death, all apparently natural, we notice that, as usual, most of the deaths are attributed to lung disease, general paralysis, and brain mischief. There has been one case of diphtheria. The deceased was an epileptic child; diphtheria has been prevalent in the neighbourhood. All the children boarded out, 7 or 8, have been therefore brought into the Asylum, and he was one of them. ‘The transfer of these children to the idiot ward at Northampton Asylum is under consideration. It would be, we think, a proper mode of dealing with them, if, as we hear, the sanitary condition of the cottages on Haywards Heath is not satisfactory. There has been no epidemic in the Asylum. There have been two inquests. The first was concluded by a verdict, that the deceased, a male patient, died from a rupture of a blood vessel in the mesentery, owing to his having sustained a blow or some violence to the abdomen during a struggle with another inmate, that the death was the result of misadventure, and that no one was to blame. The second inquest ended in a verdict that the apparent cause of death, also of a male patient, was strangulation by hanging, and no blame or censure was chargeable to the authorities of the Asylum.. He had been described as suicidal on admission, but had not been treated for such for some months previous to his death. He hanged himself from a peg in a broom closet, using his handkerchief to suspend himself by the neck. The peg has since been removed. The serious casualties have been the fractures of an arm, a rib, a clavicle, and a leg. The patients injured were five (two of them were epileptics, one was an old man); the fractures were from accidental falls. There have been besides