Volume 1

The care and cure of the insane : being the reports of The Lancet Commission on Lunatic Asylums, 1875-6-7 for Middlesex, the City of London and Surrey with a digest of the principal records extant and a statistical review of the work of each asylum from the date of its opening to the end of 1875 / by J. Mortimer Granville.

  • Granville, J. Mortimer (Joseph Mortimer), 1833-1900.
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The care and cure of the insane : being the reports of The Lancet Commission on Lunatic Asylums, 1875-6-7 for Middlesex, the City of London and Surrey with a digest of the principal records extant and a statistical review of the work of each asylum from the date of its opening to the end of 1875 / by J. Mortimer Granville. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    No special order will be observed in the sequence of Reports, but the same general arrangement of topics will be followed as closely as may be convenient in each state- ment. The need of such an inquiry has been long felt, not for public satisfac- tion or the exposure of wrongs and misdoings, but for the information of the profession which, as a body, has too much neglected the study of mental disease and contentedly lost sight of its victims. Once within the locked doors of an asylum, public or private, the insane have been shut out from the observation of practitioners engaged in the treatment of ordi- nary disease, not less completely than from the world of life and liberty. I do not think the specialists in charge of these institutions are respon- sible for this secrecy. On the contrary, the most distinguished alienists have for many years past been making earnest overtures to their brethren outside the pale of lunacy to take common action with them against the most insidious and destructive enemy of our race, the bitterest foe to culture and progress. In some degree, probably, the desire to see the profession generally interested in the subject of insanity indicates a re- action. The pursuit of psychological medicine as a branch of the arrh- science of physic has convinced those engaged in this department of study that morbid conditions of the mind are so closely connected with diseases of the body as to be incapable of separate investigation or treat- ment. In a word, the mind has refused to yield its secrets when inter- rogated apart from the body, with which it is united by a bond as enduring as life itself, and that nothing but death can rend asunder. It is barely possible to believe that specialties such as those professed by ocuhsts, aurists, and dentists, may have a genuine claim to be recognized. There must always be some division of labour, and it may be practicable to treat affections of the eyes, the ears, and the teeth, so to speak, locally. But the physician who should pretend to make a scientific diagnosis of mental disease, and apply remedies, physical or psychical, for its relief, without recognizing the vital relations in which it is connected, either as cause or effect, with disease of the body, would lay himself open to the reproach of ignorance, or stand confessed as a charlatan. It must never be forgotten that the so-called mad doctors have been the first to press this truth on the profession. It is in consequence of their unwearied efforts to assert the claims of lunacy on practitioners of general medicine that a more rational mode of regarding this important department of dis- ease is taking the place of that supercilious contempt of madness, which, as a matter of fact, sprang from ignorance and flourished in neo-lect. It was in full recognition of this historical fact, and with a sense of the discredit attaching to the systematic avoidance of mental disease as a subject of general research, that the commission to examine and report on the management, the practice, and the work accomplished in asylums for the insane, was undertaken. The present purpose is to set out the materials collected, the impressions received, and the suggestions awakened, more fully than was possible in the crowded pages of a journal