A selection of papers and prize essays on subjects connected with insanity, read before the Society for Improving the Condition of the Insane.

Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A selection of papers and prize essays on subjects connected with insanity, read before the Society for Improving the Condition of the Insane. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    another; the intellect condemning or deploring a particular course, or the predominance of a particular impulse, which it cannot, however, alter or arrest. The patient is often perfectly conscious of the morbid nature of this conflict, or his own instability and infirmity of purpose, antici- pates the result, and seeks assistance from healthier minds and artificial expedients. 3. A third mode in which the will is influenced by disease, is where there is a divided volition. The individual is urged by two impulses of equal strength; he is tossed between two opposing motives ; in judging he is unable to adopt an opinion, &c. Such men are often panic-stricken, not because they despair, but because they doubt. The difficulty descends to the most trivial transactions; there will exist the same hesitation and perplexity and dilemma in selecting the colour of a coat, in determining the direction of a walk, and in deciding the grand questions in moral science or personal conduct; wherever there is a choice there will be presented irresolution and inanity. [I have made the above extract, as containing the observations of a careful and able observer of morbid mental manifestations. In doing so, I would, however, in no way commit myself to the sanction of the latent phrenology, with its materialist tendency, contained in the extract.] APPENDIX. The Kon-Restkaint System. In the question, now so warmly disputed in England, about the system of restraint and non-restraint, the truth does not lie in the middle, but in a judicious application of both to individual cases.—Baron Feuchtersleben, Medical Psychology. The pertinacity with which the admirers of the so-called non-restraint system, endeavour to commingle^ its profession with all and every moral remedial agent which may be applied to the cure of mental disease, and to confine even the possible efficacy of these agents to their employment by the professors of their creed, renders it necessary, in an essay on the moral management of insanity, to examine this would-be groundwork of the moral treatment of insanity. This, therefore, I shall endeavour, as briefly as possible, in this place to do. I would, in the first place, observe that the observations I am about to make have no reference whatsoever to that indis- criminate system of mechanical restraint, often imposed by non- professional persons, which even so late as 1844, was found to exist in so many of the private asylums throughout the country, but only regard the question, still in dispute, whether in the treatment of the insane, it is or is not advisable in every instance to dispense with mechanicalf means of restraint, and substitute, * ** Again, and for the last time in the coiu-se of these pages, I must observe, that neither religious services have their due efiect, nor tranquil feelings exist, in an asylum, without frequent and severe interruption, if mechanical restraints are permitted, &c.—Dr. ConoUy, On the Govern- ment, &c. of Lunatic Asylums. t A padded wrist-belt is probably the most simple means ; I never find any other necessary. Gloves may be attached to it with destructive patients.