An asylum, or hospital-home, for two hundred patients : constructed on the principle of adaptation of various parts of the house to varied needs and mental states of inhabitants : with plans, etc. / by T.S. Clouston.

  • Clouston, T. S. (Thomas Smith), 1840-1915.
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An asylum, or hospital-home, for two hundred patients : constructed on the principle of adaptation of various parts of the house to varied needs and mental states of inhabitants : with plans, etc. / by T.S. Clouston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    31. All windows, except those of a few of the bedrooms, should be of three-eighths-inch plate glass, four squares to a window in second and third stories, and two squares to a window on the ground floor. 32. All the day-room windows should reach to within two feet of the floor, and some of those on the ground should go down to the floor and open as French windows do. 33. Provision should be made for training attendants sys- tematically to their work. They should begin by being taught to nurse the sick, this being an essential part of their work, and tending to produce at once that humanized, soft- ened, helpful frame of mind, with a tendency to regard the patient as an object of sympathy, study, and help, which is of the last importance in a good attendant. The attendant, after being three months in the infirmary ward, should then be sent to the ward for acute cases, and should at first have the charge of only one case, for whom he is to be held strict- ly responsible. Therefore rooms must be provided for two probationer attendants. 34. Nearly all bedrooms should have shutters, with means of ventilation at top and bottom, opposite the openings of windows in summer. 35. It must be recognized as a fact, that the general public have ideas of repulsion and horror of asylums for the insane, those ideas finding their acme in nervous persons of unstable mental equilibrium, who have an undercurrent of conscious- ness that they may become insane some day. There are many causes for those ideas: e. g., the undoubtedly repulsive nature of some forms of insanity; the terrible pictures of it drawn by the classical and modern dramatists and artists; the inhumane treatment of former times ; but, in addition to these, the prison-like character of some asylums, outside and in, has increased this feeling. It should therefore be a press- ing duty of every modern asylum architect and physician to counteract this prejudice by making asylum buildings bright, airy, and broken-up looking. A terrible amount of mental suffering might be avoided, were asylums regarded as ordi- nary hospitals are. To run even to extremes, with this view, may have a good effect in the end. 36. For practical purposes, I think the best classification of one hundred patients into wards is the following. The num-