The report of the Committee of Visitors and Medical Superintendent of the Devon County Lunatic Asylum.

  • Devon County Lunatic Asylum.
Date:
[1859?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The report of the Committee of Visitors and Medical Superintendent of the Devon County Lunatic Asylum. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    to be there placed under exactly the same circumstances as those from which it was thought right to remove them. From time to time several idiots have indeed been returned from this asylum to union houses, and they have been, almost without exception, brought back to us after having been the occasion of no little trouble and annoyance. This experience accords with that of other asylums. The result of an ex¬ periment to relieve overcrowded wards is thus recorded in the last report of the Nottingham asylum : <c Fifty-nine harm¬ less lunatics were transferred to their respective workhouses, twenty of them have already been returned as unmanageable. I understand that some of the others have given trouble to the authorities. The experiment has relieved the asylum tempo¬ rarily, but these results tend to discourage its repetition on the same scale.” But, in estimating the cost of lunatic paupers in asylums, the important consideration must not be omitted that the charge made for the care and maintenance of lunatics in county asylums, is averaged upon those whose actual cost is much greater, and those whose actual cost is less than the mean ; so that it would be unfair for the overseers of a parish to say of any single patient that he could be maintained for a smaller sum then that charged, when the probability is that there are or have been patients in the asylum from the same parish, whose actual cost to the asylum has been much greater then that charged to the parish. I have shown, that the actual cost of chronic patients in an asylum exceeds that of adult paupers in union houses to a much smaller extent than has been stated: but if all patients of this description were removed from the asylum, the inevitable result must be that the average cost of those who remained would be augmented, so that the pecuniary result to the parishes in the county would be much the same. The actual cost of an individual patient, if all things are taken into calculation, is often three or four times greater than the average. Leaving out of considera¬ tion the welfare of the patients, it would be obviously unfair to the community, that a parish having four patients in the asylum, the actual cost of two of whom was twelve shillings a week, and of the other two only four shillings a week, should