A letter to Benjamin Rotch, Esq., chairman of the committee of visitors; on the plan and government of the additional lunatic asylum for the County of Middlesex, about to be erected at Colney Hatch / by John Conolly.

Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter to Benjamin Rotch, Esq., chairman of the committee of visitors; on the plan and government of the additional lunatic asylum for the County of Middlesex, about to be erected at Colney Hatch / by John Conolly. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    15 but I wish to see still more done in your new Asylum, and also anxiously hope that your intentions, and the efforts of the many able officers who will doubtless be engaged to carry them into effect, may not be impeded either by a faulty building or a defective constitution and discipline • and this mast be my apology for yet troubling you with a few concluding words. The object of the first importance to your Com- mittee, after providing a well-arranged building, will be the appointment of a Superintendent. I do not suppose that any considerations will prevail on the Committee, in making this appointment, to elect what is called a lay governor, a non-medical superintendent, or a military or naval commandant. The only remark- able experiment of that kind known to me, and with which you can scarcely have been left unacquainted, failed so egregiously, and was attended with circum- stances so anxiously thrown into oblivion by those who committed the error, that I should suppose so extremely instructive a precedent will sufficiently warn you against the absurdity,—I could almost say the criminality,—of committing one of the most serious of human maladies to the charge of any one unin- structed in medicine, and unacquainted with the laws which regulate either the body or the mind; and of intrusting a soldier or a sailor with the classification of the insane, the choice of male and female attend- ants, and the control of the medical officers. In numerous asylums in this kingdom there are now to be found medical men who have been highly educated, and who are zealously devoting themselves to the study of mental maladies, and to the general