Nineteenth annual report of the directors of the Dundee Royal Asylum for Lunatics : submitted in terms of their charter to a general meeting of directors, 17th June 1839.

  • Dundee Royal Asylum for Lunatics.
Date:
1839
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Nineteenth annual report of the directors of the Dundee Royal Asylum for Lunatics : submitted in terms of their charter to a general meeting of directors, 17th June 1839. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    SB There is another class of patients who are occasionally suicidal, and who are generally the most difficult patients to manage,—we allude to such as seem from their birth to have a deficiency of moral feeling, with a headlong propensity to various descriptions of vice, frequently combined with a dullness of intellect, which may be termed partial idiocy. Sometimes also there are instances of the same propensity to immorality among those who are well educated and whose intellectual faculties had formerly been per¬ fectly unclouded, but the natural consequence of indulgence m habits of immorality is to reduce them also after a time to a state of partial, sometimes of total idiocy. Our experience tells us that patients of this class are seldom to be depended upon : They seem to have some obliquity which does not permit them to distinguish between right and wrong, and either lack memory or are incapable of performing their promises, by being as it were impelled to commit acts of folly and intemperance. We are per¬ suaded that this variety of insanity is often called into action by want of proper education and proper training in early youth, and that in many cases, by Judicious conduct and salutaiy discipline, derangement might have been prevented. It would have been well for many such patients that, instead of having a competency, they had been obliged to earn a livelihood by the sweat of their brow. The delusions of the patients may be slightly noticed. Some fancy they are great people—others the reverse : The former that they are the Deity, emperors, kings, &c.; the latter that they are the most unworthy of wretches, and should not be permitted to live. One garrulous old man has three progressive stages of ad¬ vancement in his elevation, and, when he thinks he can no higher go, he cries, “ Now I have got above Gideon—I am truly happy !” It is difficult to say whether the taciturnity frequently observed in insane patients arises from some delusion, such as that they are unable to speak, or that it would in their case be dangerous to them ; or from obstinacy, or from physical impossibility. The following case may perhaps “ Help to thicken other proofs That do demonstrate thinly” that sometimes it is dependent on physical disease.