The moral treatment of the insane : a lecture / by W.A.F. Browne.

  • William A. F. Browne
Date:
1864
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The moral treatment of the insane : a lecture / by W.A.F. Browne. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    and sensitive disposition, or retaining the higher qualities of the cha- racter, or in the stage of incubation, be cast into the maelstrom of a refractory ward, or, indeed, into the society of those in a similar state, the effect must be disastrous. There are many who know that they are insane, but in virtue of an intense or a diseased cunning, are able to conceal, even under the cold scrutiny of the world, their infirmity : there is a larger number who are terror-stricken by the anticipa- tion of impending mental ruin. Charles Lamb travelled with a strait-jacket in his portmanteau. Dr. Buckland, once at the head of a section of the scientific men in Britain, saw this frightful fate looming in the distance; made his wiU; appointing his medical men ; attendants ; place of seclusion or burial; and contemplated, hke Charles V, in a moral sense, his own death and entombment. To immure a man in this condition, even among tranquil dements, would precipitate fury or despair. But evei;^ lunatic has a right to be examined, adjudicated, and his real qualities tested and ascertained, before he is assigned a status and rank in an hospital; and this can only be properly done apart from the crowd with which he is to be amalgamated, and under circumstances which may display the best as well as the v.'orst features of Ihs malady. There are such Salles observation in French asylums. So perfect is the rehance on the honour and trustworthiness of large masses of the insane, and so decidedly preferable is human supervision and vigilance to mecha- nical restraints and contrivances, that airing-yards, which were first laid down as flower-gardens, and then greatly diminished in number, have, in many instances, been discontinued, and even boundary walls and ha-ha’s appear doomed to share the same fate. The magnifi- cent District Asylum at Inverness has no wall nor fence around grounds 175 acres in extent. It has been contended, and with some truth, that a park wall or paling is not, in itself, a deformity, and that the abandonment of such an arrangement may condemn many of the insane to greater confinement and restraint than what is com- ])ensated for by the aspect of perfect freedom. But, supposing these venerable buttresses arc allowed to stand, there are various provisions which enable the inmates to reach the outer world, and even to mingle with their fellow-men. When Sir W. Ellis conveyed a demented cripple, in a Bath chair, into the lanes around Ilanwell, he was check- mated by the intimation that such a procedure shocked the delicate feel- ings of the pensive public. I once disturbed the devotion of a respect- able congregation by sending a selected group to worship Him, whom 1, in my simplicity, imagined was the God of the blind, the maimed, and the broken-hearted, &c., and not of a particular class. Moreover, ])artics of workers, whom I ventured to send out, were received as hordes ot marauders, shades of moss-troopers, come to ravage the land. You live in more enlightened times. The emancipation of the lunatic has come as well as of the serf! Large parties of the insane daily take