Twenty-sixth annual report of the county and city of Worcester Pauper Lunatic Asylum.

  • Worcester Pauper Lunatic Asylum
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Twenty-sixth annual report of the county and city of Worcester Pauper Lunatic Asylum. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/74 (page 15)
    [SCHEDULE 4.] CHAPLAIN’S REPOET, 1878. To the Committee of Visitors of the County and City of Worcester Lunatic Asylum. My Lord and Gentlemen, Seeing that you are well aware no change has been made during the past twelve months in the regulations framed for my general guidance, you will not be surprised if you find no new element in the remarks I have to make in this my Seventh Annual Report as your Chaplain, which I have now the honour of pre¬ senting to you. But if I do reiterate facts which are well known to you from your monthly visitation and your counter-signature of my journal, it is for the information and, I trust, satisfaction of those into whose hands it may fall, who may be interested as rate¬ payers or otherwise in the efficiency and completeness of our Asylum arrangements in all its aspects. You have committed to my charge the spiritual welfare of the Asylum household, and, subject to our Superintendent’s judgment in its physical and psychological points of view, you desire, as far as possible, the application of the spiritual office to every patient placed with us. Amid all the difficulties that beset my work among the latter, I need scarcely tell you that there must be and are from time to time cases in which the necessity and benefit of spiritual guidance, comfort, and, so to say, sustenance are as pro¬ nounced as in the case of those who have never suffered from insanity. One may have been brought in labouring under temporary aberration, who yet must be detained for a time it may be partly even on physical grounds, and who on the dawn of returning reason and the consciousness of his position would be overwhelmed except he felt that God by His own appointed means sent him His comforting Word even into what he might think his prison. The