Annual medical report of the Kent Lunatic Asylum, at Barming Heath, Maidstone, for the year 1857-58, ending July 4th : presented to the Committee of Visitors, September 10th, 1858 and to the Court of General Sessions, October 26th 1858.

  • Kent County Lunatic Asylum.
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annual medical report of the Kent Lunatic Asylum, at Barming Heath, Maidstone, for the year 1857-58, ending July 4th : presented to the Committee of Visitors, September 10th, 1858 and to the Court of General Sessions, October 26th 1858. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Decayed persons once placed in an Asylum, are ever after lield to have been rightfully insane. If any of their descendants, therefore, become mentally afflicted, the hereditary taint is straightway accounted to them. This is, indeed, to show cause why all the world should be mad! I hold it to be wrong to send persons to an asylum merely on account of the second childhood, and a wrong operating to the general disparagement. In the first place, the practice is only an indirect consequence of poverty; next, it helps improperly to force asylums to a size inconsistent with their best management; and thirdly, it is one amongst other apparent, but not real grounds for that increase of mental disorder which is appre¬ hended with such general alarm. I think England is getting asylum- ridden: the cause of the insane having been advocated until their condition in public asylums has received a pretty full amelioration, the zeal which was so well employed in combating abuses must now be employed in some new warfare; since it does not follow because asylums generally have become mansions of much comfort, that the resort to them should not still be kept under proper restrictions. We received at least twelve persons who, in my judgment, needed not, and, therefore, ought not to have been sent, viz., seven aged, being of 70, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80, and 82 years; three children of 6, 8, and 10 years, and two adults. One of the children was not insane, but suffering from Chorea (St. Titus’s dance) affecting the whole body. This disorder had, apparently, been mistaken for Mania. The case was a severe one and ended fatally on the second day. The padded-room was found eminently useful, although probably never contemplated for afflictions of this sort. The following quotation from a review of the 11th Report of the Lunacy Commissioners, written by the talented editor of the Asylum Journal, and published in July last, discourses so well on points which I have been seeking to illustrate out of the experience of the past year, that I think the further dissemination of it can be productive only of good :—• “ We have long been painfully impressed with the utter want of system “ which generally prevails, in the manner of sending insane paupers to “ county asylums. As a rule, the transmission of a patient to the asylum “ depends far more upon the trouble he gives at a workhouse or in his “ own house, than upon any other consideration. An idiot who makes a “ howling noise, or tears his clothes is sent to the asylum, while a curable “ melancholic is detained from it. A case of dementia of twenty years’