The report of the Committee of Visitors and Medical Superintendent of the Devon County Lunatic Asylum.

  • Devon County Lunatic Asylum.
Date:
[1860?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The report of the Committee of Visitors and Medical Superintendent of the Devon County Lunatic Asylum. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    on some plan or other, there can be little doubt it will, sooner or later, be supplied. It is, however, to be hoped that when this is done, the real purpose of such institutions will be strin¬ gently adhered to, and that the motives which bring persons of independent means into pauper asylums will not be allowed to fill the wards of the intermediate asylums with patients Irom the wealthier classes of the community. It would be un¬ fortunate if an asylum ostensibly established for charitable pur¬ poses, and founded upon the donations of the benevolent, were allowed in the course of years to lapse into the condition of a private lunatic asylum, as regards the proportion of its inmates derived from the well-to-do members of society. The difficulty of treating different classes of society under the same roof, which has led to the exclusion of private patients from every county asylum in which the experiment has been tried, and which has this year led the Visitors of the Essex Asylum to record their opinion that “ the admission, of private patients, was incon¬ venient and inconsistent with the quiet and with the good management of the great body of pauper lunatics,” does not appear to have been less felt in the hospitals for the insane, founded for charitable purposes. If, therefore, the different classes of society do not advantageously amalgamate in asylums, it would seem to be most desirable that all public institutions 01 the insane should, in practice, be devoted as exclusively as possible to the use of the class for which they are founded. . I wish through the medium of this report, to call the atten¬ tion of medical men throughout the county to the manner in which medical certificates of insanity are frequently filled up, in the all important point of the facts indicating insanity observed by the certifier. The law very properly requires that the medi¬ cal certificate shall be founded upon these facts, and not upon any information derived from other persons, all of which, except as a part of the history of the case, may be considered as superogatory. The facts stated to have been observed by the certifying medical man are frequently of so vague and general a character that the certificate, if forwarded as the statute requires, to the Commissioners in Lunacy, would inevitably be rejected by them, and the certificate is there¬ fore returned fo^ amendment forthwith. A common form of statement is, that the patient’s conversation is incoherent, or that he is the subject of delusion. The authorities, how¬ ever, reject large generalizations of this kind, #nd demand particular facts, as, for instance, when the patient is the subject of delusion, that the delusions shall be specified; or, if the patient be incoherent, that the kind of incoherence shall be noted. An intoxicated person is incoherent, and some persons are not very coherent in the expression of their thoughts though they may be both perfectly sane and perfectly sober. It is,