Ninth report of the Somerset County Pauper Lunatic Asylum : from 1st January, to the end of the year 1856.

  • Somerset County Pauper Lunatic Asylum.
Date:
1857
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Ninth report of the Somerset County Pauper Lunatic Asylum : from 1st January, to the end of the year 1856. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Medical relief. are retained in the asylum, who might if fit medical manage¬ ment and proper nursetending were supplied be equally well taken care of in the workhouse. Under the existing arrange¬ ments, lunatic asylums are gradually losing their proper character of hospitals for the recovery of the insane, and sink¬ ing down to be mere auxiliaries to workhouses as was stated in the two last annual reports. The great increase in the num¬ ber of patients not curable but chronic, throws a heavy burthen on the parishes and has rendered necessary the building of ad¬ ditional asylums in Yorkshire, Lancaster, and Middlesex, and the enlargement of those in Devon, Dorset, Oxford, Gloucester, Hants, Surrey, and several other Counties. In a recent publication * Dr. Ackland states, “the whole subject of medical relief provided by the State requires funda¬ mental revision. I have been told of instances of union surgeons spending more than their salary on medicines alone for the poor for several years.” The learned writer concludes—“I think, that it is ungenerous on the part of a State to allow the very necessities and known kindness of professional men to be a means of further overworking and underpaying them.” I am happy in being able to quote such testimony in support of my previous experience of fifteen years in other institutions for the poor, and until medical relief be separated from poor law relief, by Legislative enactment, and the sick poor of sane mind, are placed on an equal footing with the insane, as regards nursing and medical comforts in an infirmary set apart for that purpose in the workhouse, or at their own homes, the crowding of lunatic asylums with improper objects must go on increasing. A Government Commission has recently been instituted to inquire respecting the state of lunatics in Ireland. When its report is brought forward in Parliament, it may be hoped that the claims of the working poor to medical relief in bodily as in mental ailment may be considered, and the whole subject legis¬ lated for; as insanity unconnected with bodily disease is not frequent, so it wxould be found if proper provision for the sick, as above stated, were made, no further additions to lunatic asylums in this or in other counties would be required. * Memoirs on the Cholera in Oxford, page 127.