State of the Lincoln Lunatic Asylum (instituted November 4, 1819) : [twenty-fifth report].

  • Lincoln Lunatic Asylum (Lincoln, England)
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: State of the Lincoln Lunatic Asylum (instituted November 4, 1819) : [twenty-fifth report]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    1845, ^ has been stated in a former report that a beneficent control, not founded on instrumental and mechanical force, produces salutary effects, under which those exaggerated and extreme cases, which formerly existed every where, and which we now occasionally hear of as an excuse for violent treatment, have gradually disappeared. The suicides formerly occurring, or attempted, in this house, are now not heard of: and from some cause not easily explained, the suicidal propensity seems to have disappeared, and to cease very soon after the admission of a patient into the house. This must partly be attributed to great attention on the point of general health, especially in the matter of fresh air and ventilation and diet; as also in the entire disuse of instrumental restraint, solitary con¬ finement, and other depressing agencies ; and in the general cheerfulness of the premises, and the open cheerful tone attempted in the whole house. The monthly balls have perhaps contributed to this effect: and it should be added, that the whole of the patients, with the rarest exceptions, are admitted : it appearing that patients on other occasions gross in their conduct and conversation, or even violent, exercise a control over them¬ selves on these evenings, and become more and more orderly at each successive meeting. On the other hand, the company is not scrupulously limited to ladies and gentlemen of superior station, but these parties are very freely accessible to children and respectable individuals, of the same class in life as the patients themselves.—Twenty-first Annual Report of the Lincoln Lunatic Asylum, 1845, p. 3. (F.) NOISINESS. 1845. Innumerable schemes have been resorted to and suggested for obviating the evil ;* such as placing the patients in upper rooms with windows turned away from the house, or with, sky-lights, or with hollow walls containing sawdust—all of which have failed in preventing the transmission of sound —which has reverberated as from a focus—or has produced that stifled and muffled noise found to be much more irritating and intolerable than the direct noise. No one in the present day would venture on the proposition to gag a noisy patient: and it may indeed be considered as established, that these patients find some sort of relief to their irritability, in their noise— and in some degree control each other by the exercise : and we would further venture the position, that any inspector who passes through an asylum, and finds all to be order and silence, ought to suspect that some severe and harsh measures have produced this unnatural repose. Accident has in some degree relieved this institution from the difficulty. It is a principle of this house that inspection shall every where be facilitated to the utmost possible extent, by the use of sash doors, which are usually glazed, and also wired when necessary in the noisy wards. The boards * [noise]
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