Twelfth report of the Derbyshire County Pauper Lunatic Asylum.

  • Derbyshire County Pauper Lunatic Asylum.
Date:
[1864?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Twelfth report of the Derbyshire County Pauper Lunatic Asylum. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    lent as with the less violent. Few minds are so abject and lost as be uninfluenced by surrounding circumstances, and it is not only the sane, but the insane also who find their feelings influenced by external agencies in a manner analagous to that described by John¬ son in his memorable sentence, that he envied not the man whose “ patriotism was not warmer on the plains of Marathon, or whose piety was not increased amid the ruins of Iona.” The poor lunatic removed from a cottage in which darkness, dirt, and disorder pre¬ dominate, and from which decency is banished by want of room, and placed in a Ward where light, cleanliness, and order are pre¬ sent, at once finds herself (and I use the feminine gender, because in all Asylums the female sex is the most disorderly, mischievous, and noisy,) surrounded by such different circumstances to what she had anticipated, that she begins to exercise a certain amount of self- control, and from an innate sense of propriety, strives to adapt herself to surrounding circumstances. The result is, that wilful damage to a single object of ornament is very rare, a hundred times more rare indeed than was the wilful damage formerly done to a coarse stool, a wooden bowl, or to the barred or wired window admitting light, but excluding the view of the distant landscape. On the male side of the Asylum, one Patient only, under the mor¬ bid idea that all “images” were a wickedness and an abomination,, emulated the zeal of John Knox as an Iconoclast, and destroyed a, cheap plaster bust of Wellington, and this is the sum of wilfull damage to Ward “ ornaments” in that department. Simple incidents! illustrate great principles. In a distant Asylum I heard a Superin¬ tendent rebuke a Patient for ill behaviour at Chapel. The respon¬ sive apology was this, “ It was no Chapel at all, it was only tha Laundry.” The Laundry having been used on Sundays as the Chapel, the genius loci of the place had no influence in inspiring awe or reverence, and the poor woman felt that the blackness was removed from her fault by its being committed in “the Laundry.” Again, some years ago I was conducting an intelligent foreigner