The operation of the four-shilling grant for pauper lunatics, and the expediency of giving it to patients satisfactorily kept elsewhere than in asylums, as in Scotland.

Date:
[between 1890 and 1899]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The operation of the four-shilling grant for pauper lunatics, and the expediency of giving it to patients satisfactorily kept elsewhere than in asylums, as in Scotland. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    device to send to the asylum, and to remove the last vestige of desire which there might be to retain a pauper patient under any sort of care outside an asylum. The Government has in effect said to the parish officials,' We will pay you a premium of 4s. a head on every pauper whom you can by hook or crook make out to be a lunatic and send into the asylum,' and just as in olden times a reward of so much for each wolfs head led to the rapid extinction of wolves in England, so we expect that this premium on lunacy will tend to diminish materially, and, perhaps, to render gradually extinct, the race of sane paupers in England JNow this was written in 1877. 1 «Q?tco^.n?'''' ^^^^^ry, 1874, were 832,370 ; January, lavs, 78d,597. A great decrease in sane paupers. fin cn?^^;' '^^^^r^' 1874, 54,375 ; January, 1893, 80,893. A great increase in pauper insane. When the Local Government Act, 1888, was passed, a sum was given to each county to defray the former Imperial grants, among others, this 4s. grant to pauper lunatics. As her share, Cumberland, for instance, got £44,796. The amount paid to guardians under section 24 (/) of this Act was £4,116 for the year ending March 31st, 1894. It_ is unnecessary for me to give figures, but I may say that in the North, which includes Durham, Northumber- land, Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire very extensive additional asylum accommodation has had' to be provided within the last twenty years, and at the present moment Durham and Lancashire are in sad straits for means of providing asylum accommodation for their patients requiring treatment. While on this subject, I may remind you that the weekly charge for a patient in a county asylum does not at all represent the actual cost of the patient: the cost for maintenance is true so far as if goes, but the original money expended on the asylum is not taken into account, nor the mterest on that money, nor the yearly up-keep of the