Volume 1

The care and cure of the insane : being the reports of The Lancet Commission on Lunatic Asylums, 1875-6-7 for Middlesex, the City of London and Surrey with a digest of the principal records extant and a statistical review of the work of each asylum from the date of its opening to the end of 1875 / by J. Mortimer Granville.

  • Granville, J. Mortimer (Joseph Mortimer), 1833-1900.
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The care and cure of the insane : being the reports of The Lancet Commission on Lunatic Asylums, 1875-6-7 for Middlesex, the City of London and Surrey with a digest of the principal records extant and a statistical review of the work of each asylum from the date of its opening to the end of 1875 / by J. Mortimer Granville. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    webbing—and in all cases supplied with a hair mattress and straw palliasse. Great care has been taken in the construc- tion of the furniture, and it would be difficult for an epi- leptic or suicidal patient to fall into danger. Every ward is amply provided with requisites for the inmates. The arrange- ments for washing and dressing are commodious, and com- fort is considered, down to the detail of placing a bottle of filtered water for drinking in each dormitory. It would be better if the bottles were replaced by small filters. It is in minor matters like this that the efficiency of management most clearly expresses itself. The two cardinal maxims of asylum management are that lunatics must be trained and attendants controlled. Mr. Marshall, the eminently- practical and painstaking superintendent of the female department at Colney Hatch, puts the proposition neatly. When an attendant com- plains that a patient is troublesome, he corrects the allegation thus : You, the attendant, are troublesome—the patient is ill. There is much sound sense in this view of the case, and the principle it embodies should be everywhere adopted. I do not like the word discipline as applied to the conduct of affairs in a house for people who have no wills of their own, or only the wreck and mockery of an intellect and conscience to guide them. In so far as there is any attempt to enforce discipline, the effort ought to be Hmited to the development of the principle of discipleship among officers of all grades in the establishment. Upon their orderly conduct, docility, and ceaseless endeavours to carry into effect the instruc- tions of their superintendent, the success of the moral treatment must always in the main depend. Lunatics are to be trained afresh in the ways of ^ life—re-educated, the past being as far as possible obliterated from recol- lection, and only gradually incorporated with the restored mental picture as the mind regains the faculty of voluntary thought and can bear to be trusted with the subjects which, hke a badly stowed and shifting cargo, previously overturned the craft and caused shipwreck. This process of re-education must be complete, and its first step ought to commence in placing the insane on the footing of children. The whole policy and system of treatment hinges on this presumption : lunatics are not only irresponsible, they are incapable of self-control. The degree of mental slavery to which disease has reduced them may vaiy from that complete abnegation of self-mastery found in the being who believes himself super- naturally possessed and a mere tool in the hands of good or evil powers above, around, or within him, to the extremely partial but not less dangerous delusion of the man who, as the common saying goes, is sane on all points except one, and that apparently a small one. Never- theless, every true lunatic is a slave to some infatuation, and it were as vain to hope to achieve his freedom by moral violence as to put down physical slavery by purely suasive influences. The mind is, so to speak, shunted