Seventeenth annual report of the directors and physician of James Murray's Royal Asylum for Lunatics. June 1844.

  • James Murray's Royal Asylum for Lunatics
Date:
1844
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Seventeenth annual report of the directors and physician of James Murray's Royal Asylum for Lunatics. June 1844. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    source. The effects are much the same, whether the excitement arise from a religious or political movement in society, or partly from both. In corroboration of the truth of this remark, reference may be made both to the first and second French Revolution, which were both a fruitful source of insanity, from the extreme excitement and fear necessarily produced in the public mind. The excitement attendant on the Reform Bill in this country sent also its victims to the several Asylums, ot which the present had its owm share. The character of those affected with insanity, and the different forms in which the malady presents itself, is greatly diversified. —no two cases of the one hundred and forty-five at present under treatment, being, perhaps, in all respects, the same. It were in vain, therefore, to attempt, within the limits of this Report, anything like an analysis of the cases of the various patients now in the Asylum; nor, perhaps, though it were practicable, would it answer any good purpose. Let therefore two cases suffice. It is observed by a learned author,*, in speaking of a certain class of the insane, that their “ memory is often remarkably retentive; but it appears to be merely a power of retaining facts, or words, in the order and connexion in which they have been presented to them, without the capacity of tracing relations, and forming new associations. In this mannci they sometimes acquire languages, and even procure a name for a kind of scholarship.” No fact is better ascertained than that just referred to, yet in our Courts of Law it is constantly reared up as a bugbear to frighten Judge and Jury in those cases where a person is cognosced, with the view of testing his sanity, to deter them from bringing in a verdict of insanity. Many cases might be referred to in proof of this, and the author just quoted refers to one, quite in point, where the evidence, in de¬ fence, in substance was,—that the party, under trial, had been, K Dr. Abcrcromby on the Intellectual Towers, p 344.