The construction and government of lunatic asylums and hospitals for the insane / by John Conolly.

Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The construction and government of lunatic asylums and hospitals for the insane / by John Conolly. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    sity exposed in both such places to innumerable disadvantages, only to be avoided in larger public asylums. Their diet, their clothing, their lodging, are all generally of the most wretched description; the means of occupation are very limited ; space for exercise is wanting; means of recreation and amusement are unthought of or unknown ; and security is only effected by confining the limbs of the violent or troublesome, or by build- ings so contrived as almost to shut out light and air, and utterly to exclude cheerfulness. All these circumstances are mani- festly unfavorable to the recovery, or even to the amendment of those thus confined ; and, whilst there is not any founda- tion for the assertion, that the number of cures, in curable or recent cases, is greater in private licensed houses for paupers than in public asylums, the mortality in such licensed houses has been shown far to exceed that of the public institutions. Of the recent cases sent into public asylums, if not epileptic or affected with paralysis, about fifty per cent, recover: this appears to be the real average of recoveries in all public asy- lums, calculating the recoveries on the average daily number of patients in them; and it probably represents the actual curability of insanity, exclusive of relapses. But at present the public or county asylums are nearly filled with old and incurable cases; the patients having been lirst sent, in the recent and curable state of their malady, to the private licensed houses, or detained in workhouses, and only transferred to the county asylums when they became unmanageable or were con- sidered to be incurable. As regards the question of expense, also, it appears that when once a county asylum is built and opened the patients are maintained in it at less cost than in private licensed houses; the average charge per week in the licensed houses being 8s. 1 lid.; and the average cost in county asylums 7s. 6fd.; constituting a saving to the parishes of nearly Is. 6d. per week for each patient; which in an asylum for 300 patients would constitute a considerable annual saving to the rate-payers of the county. How much better the pauper lunatic is taken care of in any