Report on insanity and idiocy in Massachusetts / by the Commission on Lunacy, under resolve of the Legislature of 1854.

  • Massachusetts. Commission on Lunacy.
Date:
1855
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report on insanity and idiocy in Massachusetts / by the Commission on Lunacy, under resolve of the Legislature of 1854. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    but under commission—that is, under the guardianship of the Lord Chancellor. This report did not include a considerable class of insane persons of all ranks of life under the care of guardians and relations ;* and of course all those who were not paupers, and who were at their homes, or boarding with friends or in private families, were omitted. An enumeration of the people of France was made within a few years. The facts were sought with great apparent care by the agents of the government, and the results published under its authority, aided by the counsel of men of science. Seventy pages of a folio volume are exclusively devoted to the statement of the number and condition of the insane in every department, in each of the seven years, from 1836 to ]841 in- clusive. This would seem to be a perfectly reliable document; yet a careful analysis suggests some doubt as to its accuracy. Of the eighty-six departments into which the kingdom is divided, eleven return no lunatics through all of these seven years. Sixty-five return none at their homes or boarding in private families. Some report them in round numbers in even hundreds. Others report the same unvarying number through successive years. One reports two hundred for seven succes- sive .years, and another three hundred through six years, without variation. In one, the number increases, in two years, twenty- five hundred per cent., and diminishes as much in four years more. These and many similar statements, equally improbable and unnatural, lead to the inference that they were founded upon estimate, and even conjecture, rather than on personal inquiry and actual enumeration. In some nations, the statement of the number of the insane includes only those in the public hospitals. A writer in the American Medical Journal assumes this ground to determine the number of insane in some parts of Italy, several of the large cities of Europe and Cairo, and calculates the proportion of lunacy to their several people on this basis. A census of lunacy in Belgium, apparently taken from actual * Beport of Metropolitan Commission in Lunacy for 1844, page 182.