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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    this power are to bo found in the code of laws prescribed by the governors, by inspectors appointed by the country, by public and professional opinion, and above all by the condition, tastes, and character of those committed to his charge. There is, however, still a dillerence of opinion as to whether this rule should be confided to the hands of a medical man or not. In Ireland laymen were recently em])loyed. It is argued medicine is of little use, or, if of use, is not used. When you find, from the registers of ten asylums containing about 2000 inmates, that not more than 300 of these are under medical treatment for mental disease; and that in one asylum containing 1900 inmates only 200 are under medical treatment and extra diet,—that is, the Beefsteak and Porter system, —several suppositions present themselves. Either we have to do with an intractable malady, or that these institutions are especially burdened or crowded with chronic cases, or that the medical olficers place little reliance upon therapeutical means. I am, however, dis- posed to adopt a more favorable and encouraging construction, and to regard the field for the operation of moral treatment as wide, the means ample, and the opinions of the medical officers as attach- ing great importance to mental therapeutics. It must at once be admitted that he who, entrusted with the responsibility described, conceives that the duties of a physician end with the routine visit, with pulse exploration and pdl prescribing, even with the supervision of a wise and suitable course of medication, is ux distressing ignorance of what is required and exacted in such a position. His call is to a mission, not to a practice. He must live wit/t and for the insane; he must enter into their pursuits, pleasures, even their thoughts; he must cherish a direct relation and intercommunion with the minds of those who, according to their natures, love him, fear him, depend upon him; he must com- ])ensate for the poverty and inertness of his remedies, by the hberality of his sympatliy, love, and self-sacrifice. But to whom, rather than the well-educated physician, is such a sacred and momentous trust to be consigned ? Coleridge has said, with great acumen, that “ in the treatment of nervous disease he is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope. There must exist a benevolence, a kindness, which sliall be so deep and expansive as to feel sympathy for the lunatic, not merely because he is an alien to his kind, because he is visited with the heaviest and hardest affliction which humanity can bear and live; but will feel interest in those unreal, and artificial, and self-created miseries with which the spirit is oppressed, and which will be as solicitous to alleviate suffering where it is absurd, and where it is he result of perversity of temper, as wlxere it flows from misfortune, t-here must be that benevolence which will, at an immeasurable listance, imitate the mercy of Him who, in curing the broken