Eighth report of the Somerset County Pauper Lunatic Asylum : from 1st January to the end of the year 1855.

  • Somerset County Pauper Lunatic Asylum
Date:
1856
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Eighth report of the Somerset County Pauper Lunatic Asylum : from 1st January to the end of the year 1855. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    there are many insane poor in workhouses where there are no lunatic wards) and that for cases requiring it, if proper attendance were provided, the necessity of endless additions to the county asylums might be avoided. It appears that physical causes have been frequent here Causes in males; they are more subject to diseases of the nervous centres, (the brain and spinal cord) which will also account for the greater mortality of males than females. The moral causes have been more frequent amongst the females, the majority of whom were attacked at an earlier period oi life, when the sympathies are more readily affected. By some of the most eminent modern writers on insanity, as Piinel and Esquirol, the causes are considered primarily to depend on derangement of the digestive functions, and frequently to be connected with tubercular disease of the lungs. The history of past ages clearly demonstrates.the inti¬ mate connection between insanity and those epidemics which ravaged nations and destroyed multitudes of the human race. Such was the (1) Black Death, (2) Dancing Mania, and (3) Sweating Sickness, as described by Hecker, in his « History of the'Epiclemics of the Middle Ages,’’ translated from the German by Dr. Babington, who in his admirable preface well observes, “ that the mind and the body reciprocally and mysteriously affect each other, and the maladies wmch are the subject of these pages, are so intimately connected with the disordered state of both, that it is often uifficult to determine on which they more essentially depend, oi whicn they more seriously influence.” (1) In the fourteenth century, one quarter, at least, of the population of the Old World -was swept away in the short space of four years, and some countries, England among the rest, lost more than double that proportion of their inhabitants in the course of a few months, by the Black death ; the -accomplished translator, writing at the time of the first visitation of Cholera, besides the value of the authentic facts furnished, says, “ I have another, perhaps I may be allowed to say a better motive for laying before my countrymen this narrative of the sufferings of past ages, that by comparing them with those of our own time, we may be made the more sensible how lightly the chastening hand of Providence has fallen on the present generation, -and how much reason, therefore, we have to feelgrateful for the mercy shown us” In 1347 there was a failure in the crops and a famine, especially m Italy, in April of that year at Florence 94,000 loaves, fibs, each, were daily dispensed to the poor. In 1348 in the Island of Cyprus, a pestiferous wmd spread so poisonous an odour, that many fell down dead m great agony, this rare phenomenon wras followed by an earthquake. It was an Oxienta plague, marked by inflammatory boils and tumors of the glands—gangieue of the lungs, bloody evacuations. It often commenced with bleeding of tne
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