[General report of the Royal Hospital of Bethlem, for the year ending 31st December, 1885] / Bethlem Royal Hospital.

  • Bethlem Royal Hospital (London, England)
Date:
1886]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: [General report of the Royal Hospital of Bethlem, for the year ending 31st December, 1885] / Bethlem Royal Hospital. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    relations, including the one who signed the “ Order ” for reception, and after communicating with and getting the sanction of the Commissioners, I decided on the surgical opinion “ that life was at stake, that without operation the patient must die.” Under the last head I have placed social treatment, and to my mind this is the one great method of treatment for nearly all cases of disorder of mental function in contradistinction to diseases of brain and nerve. When one hears of one Asylum vaunting treatment without locks, and another of cottage care, it all points in the same direction that the doctors are trusting their patients more, and are not merely governing or controlling them. It is quite possible to have an Asylum so managed that neither suicides nor homicides ever occur, and yet, to my thinking, that Asylum may be badly managed. No good is done to many patients by simply preventing harm; they require their surroundings to be varied, they require to be led back to work or to sympathy. By social treatment I mean any measure which will tend to develope healthy mental action. In one case I may take a patient’s delusions, and by evidence of his own selection demolish fancy after fancy. I may be said to be “ answering a fool according to his folly,” but I have seen a good many cases now in which the destruction of the fancy has been followed by a more or less permanent calm, and this has led to recovery.