Sixteenth report of the Derbyshire County Pauper Lunatic Asylum.

  • Derbyshire County Pauper Lunatic Asylum.
Date:
[1868?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sixteenth report of the Derbyshire County Pauper Lunatic Asylum. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    TO THE COMMITTEE OF VISITORS OF THE DERBY COUNTY ASYLUM. Gentlemen, In accordance with the requirements of my office, I beg to present to you the Sixteenth Annual Report of the Derby County Asylum. On the 1st of January, 1867, there were one hundred and sixty- eight Men, and one hundred and sixty-seven Women in the Asylum, and during the year fifty-five Men and forty-two Women were ad¬ mitted, making a total of four hundred and thirty-two persons who have been under treatment during the year 1867. In my Fifteenth Report I had to state that a large proportion of the Patients admitted were suffering from profound Melancholia, with a disposition to suicide, and it has been the case in a corres¬ ponding degree during the year that has just closed. One poor fellow, seventy years of age, died in six days after admission from exhaustion, and from a wound which he had inflicted on his throat, prior to his removal from home. Several Patients have had to be fed daily by means of the stomach pump, to prevent them from destroy¬ ing themselves by starvation. The wife of a mechanic from the neighbourhood of Matlock, gave us great anxiety, from this cause, for a considerable period, as she was fed with difficulty, and more¬ over, was far advanced in pregnancy. She was, ultimately, delivered of a male child, and at the close of the year, we had the gratification of discharging her quite well. A single Woman, the daughter of a demented man now in the House, was also brought to the Asylum in a pregnant condition, and was delivered while in a state of frantic mania ; the child, however, was still-born. One Man, admitted, had been rendered desponding, and suicidal, from losses sustained through the Cattle Plague. It could hardly be ex¬ pected otherwise, then that a pestilence which raged among the