Volume 2

Health lectures for the people.

Date:
1883-1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Health lectures for the people. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/600 (page 3)
    I cannot attack any of the many social aspects of lunacy unless I give you a brief sketch of the history of the treatment of insanity, for, of course, out of it have originated all social aspects. The history of the treatment of the mentally afflicted has been well stated to be divisible into three epochs—the barbaric, the humane, and the remedial. But this does not take into account the very humane and probably highly remedial system of treatment which obtained in very ancient times. In Egypt the temples of Saturn, and in Greece the Asclepian hospitals, were resorted to by those men- tally afflicted, and the treatment there adopted was identical in principle (and perhaps superior in practice) with that of the pre- sent day. The directions given by all the classical medical authors, and especially by Hippocrates, who flourished 400 B.C., and by Galen, who practised a century B.C., are of the soundest character. How long their influence existed it is difficult to say, but in the middle ages little or no attention was paid in Great Britain or elsewhere to the care or cure of the insane. In 1537, a house in Bishopsgate Street, London, fell into the possession of the Corporation, and was appropriated for the reception of fifty lunatics. This, the first Bethlehem Hospital or Bedlam, was removed in 1675 to Moorfields, and in 1814 the present magnificent hospital was erected in St George's Fields. Another hospital, St Luke's, was instituted in 1751. Bedlams, or houses of detention for lunatics, appear to have existed in other cities, but with these exceptions no provision was made for the insane, who were allowed to wander at large. There is only too good reason for believing that many hundreds, I fear I am not exaggerating when I say many thousands, were executed as criminals or witches during this barbaric period. About 1750 the condi- tion of the insane attracted some amount of public attention, and the incarceration in mad-houses of a considerably larger number than formerly followed; not on account of any philan- thropic sympathy with their condition, but as a measure demanded for the public safety and comfort. But this measure by no means brought about the termination of the barbaric period. The houses misnamed Asylums were in the hands of private parties, under