Lunacy and pauperism / by D. Yellowlees.

  • Yellowlees, D. (David)
Date:
[1884]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lunacy and pauperism / by D. Yellowlees. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    afflicted relative, and to avoid what was falsely deemed a degra- dation, the savings of years spent without a murmur, and many a hardship cheerfully endured for the sake of a poor lunatic who was all unconscious of the sacrifice. Sometimes, too, after years of struggling, when ill-health or age or poverty had come to the workers and made struggling vain, I have felt sadly that help had been asked, or had been granted, too late, and that the household could never rise again to the old level of independence and self-support. On the other hand, I have sometimes felt that help had been asked too soon, or, through private influence, had been too readily granted, and that those who should have borne the burden had transferred it to the public under the specious plea that it would cost the parish nothing, since the Government grant and the relatives' contributions would repay all the cost of maintenance. Still I cannot too earnestly say that it is true economy as well as true kindness to help such cases in time. It is far better and wiser and easier to help one when the help can be effectual than to have a whole family pauperised, and the spirit which prompts such independence and self-sacrifice as I have described is too noble and too rare, to be allowed to die under its burden. My experience is that a parish always deals kindly and liberally with its own native cases of this kind, but that the cases where the relief given has to be recovered from another parish are apt to get hard measure. I know no kind of public help which demands more wise discretion in its bestowal, nor in which it is more needful to temper justice with mercy. The extent to which intemperance and vice increase the number of lunatic paupers is sorrowfully great, and is sometimes apt to harden the heart. Intemperance is the assigned cause of insanity in only about 15 per cent, of asylum admissions; but this refers merely to the habits of the individual. It does not include the tendency to insanity inherited from drunken ancestors, nor the brain mischief wrought in the drunkard's home by the poverty and hardships, the sorrow and care, the danger and violence which his vice entails. None can measure these, and insanity is but one phase of the curse they bring. We can only strive and hope that by better education of head and heart, by healthier houses, by kindlier sympathy and better example from those