Eighteenth annual report of the Somerset County Pauper Lunatic Asylum : from the 1st of January to the end of the year 1865.

  • Somerset County Pauper Lunatic Asylum
Date:
1866
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Eighteenth annual report of the Somerset County Pauper Lunatic Asylum : from the 1st of January to the end of the year 1865. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The removal of the Welsh patients took place last May. They were about 40 in number. On leaving, they were accompanied to the Wells Station by the Asylum band ; they proceeded by rail to Burnham, and thence by steamer to Cardiff. The passage across the Bristol Channel was very rough. Two of the number, who had been sailors, were most diligent in their attendance on the others who were sick and helpless: all arrived in safety at their destination on the same afternoon. Several quiet and harmless old cases have been sent to workhouse infirmaries: some have been sent back as being troublesome. The return of such cases may always be reckoned upon until the law is altered, and it is made compulsory on Poor Law Unions to provide all medicine and necessaries for workhouse infirmaries, and to discontinue the contract system which at present holds out inducements to send sick and troublesome paupers to asylums. This subject has been so often brought forward, in these reports and elsewhere, by the writer, that any but a mere allusion to it would only be a tiresome reiteration. On this subject my views are so clearly stated in a few sentences, in a leading article on “ Hospitals,” in the Times of February 26th, 1866, that I have here inserted them:— “ As far as we are concerned, we can only proceed on our old lines, and insist upon the sick ward of the union workhouse as the proper basis of all care for the sick poor. It is wild work to go on, day after day, adding institution to institution, with the certainty, and, indeed, the evident fact, that each new one overlies the older, and that while the uppermost have vastly more than they can do, the lower¬ most have more money than they can spend and officers paid for doing nothing. We ought rather to make the existing machinery do its work than supersede it with new machinery doomed to rust in its turn. It is the common duty of a community such as ours to see that the sick and infirm, if they are proper objects of charity, shall have proper hospital room and hospital treatment.” The mortality has been 8J per cent, on the total number under treatment, which is about the same rate as last year. The causes were the same as usual,—principally diseases of the lungs, and chronic inflammation of the membranes of the brain, and softening of the spinal cord. Several aged
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