Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The moral treatment of the insane : a lecture / by W.A.F. Browne. 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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![this power are to be found in the code of laws prescribed by the governors^ by inspectors appointed by the country, by public and professional opinion, and above all by the condition, tastes, and character of those committed to his charge. There is, however, still a difference of opinion as to whether this rule should be confided to the hands of a medical man or not. In Ireland laymen were recently employed. It is argued medicine is of little use, or, if of use, is not used. When you find, from the registers of ten asylums containing about 2000 inmates, that not more than 300 of these are under medical treatment for mental disease; and that in one asylum containing 1900 inmates only 200 are under medical treatment and extra diet,—that is, the Beefsteak and Porter system, —several suppositions present themselves. Either we have to do with an intractable malady, or that these institutions are especially burdened or crowded with chronic cases, or that the medical officers place little reliance upon therapeutical means. I am, however, dis- posed to adopt a more favorable and encouraging construction, and to regard the field for the operation of moral treatment as wide, the means ample, and the opinions of the medical officers as attach- ing great importance to mental therapeutics. It must at once be admitted that he who, entrusted with the responsibility described, conceives that the duties of a physician end with the routine visit, with pulse exploration and pill prescribing, even with the supervision of a wise and suitable course of medication, is in distressing ignorance of what is required and exacted in such a position. His call is to a mission, not to a practice. He must live with and for the insane; he must enter into their pui'suits, pleasures, even their thoughts; he must cherish a direct relation and intercommunion with the minds of those who, according to their natures, love him, fear him, depend upon him; he must com- pensate for the poverty and inertness of his remedies, by the hberality of his sympathy, love, and self-sacrifice. But to whom, rather than the well-educated physician, is such a sacred and momentous trust to be consigned ? Coleridge has said, with great acumen, that in the treatment of nervous disease he is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope. There must exist a benevolence, a kindness, which shall be so deep and expansive as to feel sympathy for the lunatic, not merely because he is an alien to his kind, because he is visited with the heaviest and hardest affliction which humanity can bear and live ] but win feel interest in .those unreal, and artificial, and self-created miseries with which the spirit is oppressed, and which wiU be as sohcitous to alleviate sufiering where it is absurd, and where it is the result of perversity of temper, as where it flows from misfortune. There must be that benevolence which will, at an immeasurable distance, imitate the mercy of Him who, in curing the broken](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21940113_0031.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
