Family care for the chronic insane : Miss Alice Cooke and her patients / by F. B. Sanborn.

  • Sanborn, F. B. (Franklin Benjamin), 1831-1917.
Date:
[1902]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Family care for the chronic insane : Miss Alice Cooke and her patients / by F. B. Sanborn. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    slender thread, and feeling her way along, has advanced with faith and courage towards those who awaited her with trembling hope. Nothing shows more than her case the importance which, despite their useless waste of human life and hu- man capacity, men really attach to a human soul. Perhaps there are not more than three living women whose names are more widely known than hers; and there is not one who has excited so much sympathy and interest. Thou- sands of women are striving to attract the world's notice and gain its admiration,—some by the natural magic of beauty and grace, some by the high nobility of talent, some by the lower nobility of rank and title, some by the vulgar show of wealth. But none of them has done it so effectually as this poor, blind, deaf and dumb girl, by the silent show of her misfortunes and her successful efforts to surmount them. But it is not of Laura that I am writing to-day; her name but serves me for an example. To most persons who think of the insane as raving, mop- ing or murderous persons, and view them with alarm or repulsion, the fam- ily care of an insane woman, with the liberty of the house and garden, the fields and woods, will probably seem, and has seemed, in ages past, and even in our own day, something impossible. The custom has been to seclude them in close asylums, amid scores of their own kind,—formerly they were chained, also, cast into damp dun- geons, ducked in cold ponds, flogged, and prayed over, to drive out the evil spirit with which they were thought to be possessed. To give such crea- tures the free range of a household, the control of a kitchen, the manage- ment of a poultry-yard, has seemed to most of the unthinking public a pre- posterous or perilous thing. Yet for centuries this has been done in the lit- tle city of Gheel in Belgium, and its rural suburbs; for half a century it has been a useful custom in Scotland; and now it has been adopted in France, in Germany, Eussia, and Holland, in some parts of England, and in Massachu- setts. To such an extent has this family care of the insane gone in Europe that, last September, its friends and experts held in Antwerp, within easy reach of Gheel, an international congress or conven- tion, lasting a week, and giving birth to a volume of 900 pages, which has gone through the press in that pic- turesque Flemish city. Having been invited by the authorities of the con- gress to attend its sessions, and being unable so to do, I sent a report on the experiment of family care made in New England nearly twenty years ago, and so successful, though on a small scale, that it is now being extended, and is firmly planted in the philanthropic soil of Massachusetts. My report, not before printed in America, follows: FAMILY CARE FOR THE INSANE IN MASSACHUSETTS. With Remarks on the Care of the American Insane Elsewhere. Written for the Inter- national Congress at Antwerp, September 1 to 7, 1902. By F. B. Sanborn, Formerly Lunacy Inspector of Massachusetts. The care of the insane in families is no new thing in the United States; indeed, it was the customary thing until the year 1820, although there were a few asylums for the violent and troublesome cases, in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New England before that date; while many also were restrained in the very unsatisfactory prisons. But it would seem that two thirds of the insane, both acute and chronic, had their residence in the family where the malady first showed itself, or in some other household, better or worse adapted to their treatment. Those who resided, as many did from 1820 to 1900, in town and city almshouses, were often under strictly family care; the house being small, with few inmates of the public poor, and managed by a single couple (man and wife), who, by practice, became fairly well able to give the demented or even maniacal persons under their care as good treatment as at that period they would have received in the asylums for the insane, which were far from perfect. But there was much neglect, through ignorance, and some abuses, which, when investigated and made public by Miss Dorothea Dix and others, half a century ago, became a public scandal, and led to the establishment, in most of the states of the Ameri- can union, of hospitals or asylums for the medi- cal oversight and curative or restraining treat- ment of the majority of the insane. . In this succession of events, the real merits of ri- ll, RC-Y-2Q