Thirty-seventh annual report of the Suffolk Lunatic Asylum : December, 1874.

  • Suffolk Lunatic Asylum.
Date:
[1875]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Thirty-seventh annual report of the Suffolk Lunatic Asylum : December, 1874. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    poured their waters, and the Nile has overflowed at my command. I have restrained the rage of the Dog-star, and mitigated the fervours of the Crab.” Twelve patients, five male and seven females, have been dis¬ charged at the urgency of their relatives on trial for different short periods. This power of discharging on trial as sanc¬ tioned by the Legislature has many advantages; it is a convincing proof to the friends of the patient’s actual position, and to the patients themselves of the necessity or wisdom of their remaining at home. Where these persons can be properly provided for and generously fed, their cure may be perfected at home : but if they are subjected to deprivations and low diet they are sure to come back worse than they went. As a guard against this hazard, the Act of Parliament sanc¬ tions a temporary allowance equivalent to what would be the charge of such patient if in the Asylum. It is this convic¬ tion that makes the Commissioners so imperative in their demands as to diet in the Union House, and to assimilate it to the tables of nourishment of every well regulated Asylum. In some Asylums extra diet has been largely prescribed, and in irritability, all medical authorities agree that liberal diet is more efficacious than all the so called sedative drugs. At the close of the last Quarter the House became incon¬ veniently full, and knowing the impossibility of obtaining further accommodation by home labour, it was not without reluctance that under the sanction of the House Committee thirteen patients were selected by the medical officer as fit to be removed to the Ipswich Borough Asylum. The transfer of patients from one Asylum to another has been necessitated in several instances. Application was made from the Essex Asylum for the admission of some Essex paupers during the completion of the enlargements at Brentwood, at the very time that our own patients were being sent away. Other Asylums have been obliged to seek relief from their over-