Report of the Committee of Visitors and of the medical superintendent of the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, for the year 1868.

  • West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the Committee of Visitors and of the medical superintendent of the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, for the year 1868. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    prospect of dealing adequately with the increase of insanity is to be looked for. The removal of chronic cases to work-houses, or to houses specially provided for them, where they will be relegated to a hopeless existence, is a miserable, if necessary expedient. The extension of our Asylums is an expensive and unsatisfactory operation, and seems almost an endless one. The true method of meeting our difficulties, which are always assuming more portentous dimensions, is undoubtedly to be found in the application of medical science, to the cure and prevention of mental diseases. Something, more remains to be done, beyond the mere provision of commodious quarters for our increasing number of lunatics. We cannot he conteut with a system which would simply provide convenient storeage of heaps of social debris. We must insist that Asylums should become hospitals more and more; and should subordinate safe custody and comfortable lodging, to cure and scientific explora¬ tion : for it is but reasonable to hope that a careful, sustained, and general inquiry into the causes, pathology, and treatment of mental derangements, would multiply our resources and give precision to our efforts in dealing with them, and enable us to warn against circumstances that conduce to create them, and to guide to prophylactive measures. At any rate the experiment has not yet been fairly tried. Asylum medical officers have been hitherto so much and strenuously occupied in the introduction of the humane system of treatment, in the elaboration of a scheme of disci¬ pline under circumstances of unexampled embarrassment, in the prac¬ tical questions of architectural construction or financial economy, or in contention with opposition to that supreme medical authority, under which the successful administration of a lunatic Asylum is alone possible ; that they have not been able to give sufficient attention to medical research. Insanity has not yet been studied in that strict inductive method, with that prolonged and
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