Twenty-fifth annual report of the medical superintendent of the lunatic asylum, for the counties of Salop and Montgomery, and for the borough of Wenlock, 1869 / [Salop and Montgomeryshire Counties Lunatic Asylum].

  • Salop and Montgomeryshire Counties Lunatic Asylum.
Date:
1870
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Twenty-fifth annual report of the medical superintendent of the lunatic asylum, for the counties of Salop and Montgomery, and for the borough of Wenlock, 1869 / [Salop and Montgomeryshire Counties Lunatic Asylum]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    12/68 (page 12)
    The hopeless character of the Mental Disease in the majority of these admissions, will be evident when it is stated that only about 13 per cent, admit of any prospect of recoveiy ; the others from the character and complications, or the duration of their insanity are hope¬ lessly insane, and include an unusually large number of Patients of very advanced age; no less than forty-two or nearly a third of the whole Admissions were over 50, eleven were between 70 and 80, and four between 80 and 90. The age at which the greatest number was admitted was between 45 and 50. The bodily condition of the majority was below the average, twenty were reported as extremely weak and feeble, quite broken down in health, the result in many instances of vicious indulgences and frequent debaucheries, ninety-eight others were in bad health, and in only ten was the bodily condition at all satisfactory. Two Females were pregnant on admission, one of whom gave birth to a child in the Asylum. Three were suffering from Phthisis, two were blind, two were lame, and two were deaf mutes. One Patient, an Epileptic idiot, was brought to the Asylum in a fearfully neglected and emaciated condition: he had been found by the police in a garret in his father’s house covered with filth and vermin, he had several large sores about his body, two toes had sloughed off the right and one off the left foot, and his feet generally were ulcerated and in the condition of an open sore. Criminal proceedings were com¬ menced against the parents, but the case broke down from some unexplained cause. The forms which the Mental Disease assumed in the admissions were as follows:—One hundred were suffering from simple insanity, namely, sixty from the various forms of mania, thirty-three from melancholia, one from monomania, and six from simple dementia : epileptic insanity occurred in eleven cases, general paresis in fourteen, senile dementia in eleven, and that form of dementia consequent upon organic lesion of the brain in two instan¬ ces. Thirteen cases were idiots or imbeciles, among whom were seven epileptics, and two other patients suffered from hemiplegia. Of the total admissions of the past year, fifty-five cases had been insane upwards of one year previous to admission; twelve of these had been insane many years, and in thirteen the disease was of congenital origin, therefore thirty-six per cent, were chronic cases, the majority of whom are past recovery. The dislike which friends and relatives and often parish officers have of sending Patients to an Asylum in the earlier stages of their malady, is undoubtedly to a very great extent, the cause of the present overcrowding of Institutions for the Insane, and the enormous increase of late years in the number of incurable admis¬ sions. No matter how insane a Patient may be, if he continue quiet aud manageable they hesitate to remove him; he is kept at