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.

    17/600 (page 5)
    pointed to investigate into lunacy matters in Scotland. This tardiness was due to the existence of chartered Eoyal Asylums at Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Montrose, Dundee, Dumfries, and Aberdeen, which had been established at various periods between the years 1798 and 1840. But the resources of these institutions being overtaxed, and doubts having arisen as to the proper management of private pauper asylums, a Eoyal Commission was issued, on whose recommendation a Lunacy Board for Scot- land was established, the country divided into districts, each of which was compelled to build accommodation for the pauper insane, and all private asylums for paupers were gradually abolished. I must ask you to accept this resume of the history of the treatment of the insane, brief and imperfect as it is, as time w^ill not permit me further to elaborate it. But I think enough has been said to enable me to approach those aspects or phases of popular opinion springing from it, to which I desire particularly to direct your attention to-night. I will endeavour ,to treat of these under three heads. The first is the feeling of doubt and suspicion which still lurks in the public mind as to lunacy administration and lunatic asylums. In the second place I intend to combat certain popular errors which have arisen out of the action of legislation ; and thirdly, we shall inquire whether in certain matters we are not too well satisfied with the manage- ment of the insane as it at present exists. The feeling of doubt and suspicion as to lunacy matters is, I am happy to say, distinctly on the wane. In whatever strength it exists, it is the natural outcome of the popular recollection of the stories of cruelty, wrong, and inhumanity which startled the public mind in times gone by, and called forth much powerful and painful feeling. Such feelings die hard. But apart from this the Briton ever jealously watches over the liberty of the subject; and he watches all the more jealously when misfortune, not crime, tends to deprive the citizen of freedom. Now I think I am justified in saying that this feeling of doubt and mistrust exists much more strongly in England than in Scotland, and I believe this part of our subject will be best