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

  • Devon County Lunatic Asylum.
Date:
[1855?]
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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    by a single hand. The unexclusive and unempirical method of treating insanity must be called medico-moral: and such a method it has ever been your Superintendent’s aim to practise in the wards of this Institution. Mechanical restraint is never employed, and seclusion^ (separation from others of an excitable patient) is made use of in the least obnox¬ ious manner possible under the circumstances requiring it. Rooms, made cheerful and comfortable, are provided for this purpose, so that Patients frequently submit to remain in them during a period of excitability without being locked in. They may be called retiring rooms rather than seclusion rooms; and the voluntary occupation of them by an irritable Patient frequently prevents an outbreak of angry excitement. When a Patient is first admitted, suffering under an acute form of Insanity, the treatment is principally medical. He is indeed addressed in a kind and soothing manner; if he is violent, care is taken to withdraw from him sources of irritation, and his excited and angry feelings are generally found to calm themselves when opposed by patience and good temper; if he is distressed, he is comforted; if he is suicidal, he is cheered and watched; in fact he is treated with the kindness and consideration most likely to sooth a sane person under the dominion of strong emotion. But it would be incorrect to assert that such behaviour exerts any considerable influence in arresting the progress of the disease in its acute stages; it must be withstood at that time by active medical treatment. Insanity is a disease of the brain; and although, under kind and gentle management, the diseased processes are far more likely to cease spontaneously than under the harshness and cruelties formerly practised, still no Physician who has faith in his science can withhold the potent means at his command. In the early stages of Insanity the most prominent and important symptom is loss of sleep, occasioned, without doubt, by morbid processes going on in the brain. If sound and refreshing sleep can be procured at an early period, in a case of recent Insanity, a speedy recovery may be anticipated; but if wakefulness is continued for a