Report of the medical superintendent with the accounts of the treasurer of the Norfolk Lunatic Asylum, for the year 1864.

  • Norfolk Lunatic Asylum (Norfolk, England)
Date:
[1865?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the medical superintendent with the accounts of the treasurer of the Norfolk Lunatic Asylum, for the year 1864. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    cceteris paribus, Insanity is not more likely to recur than other diseases : in other words, it obeys the same laws as they do in the matters of causes— predisposing and exciting, prevention, cure, relapses, and the like; so that, just as a person who having from exposure to damp and cold, induced an attack of Bronchitis, or Bheumatic Fever, may after recovery, renew these diseases by a second exposure, so may an insane man, on his recovery and discharge, induce a fresh attack of Insanity by exposure to its causes— whatever these may have been—and become again an inmate of an Asylum ; but (most unreasonably and unfairly) whereas a general Hospital would get the credit of curing the bronchitic or rheumatic patient twice, the Lunatic Asylum would have to bear the opprobrium of being powerless to cure at all! as though, forsooth, Insanity, of all diseases, was the only one to be cured outright and for ever! How illogical and absurd to suppose that Gods laws should not hold good for Insanity as well as other diseases! From all this it will be at once evident that our ^-admissions are very frequently, as in general hospitals, equivalent to new cases, and by no means to be set down as proofs of imperfection in the treatment of Insanity—as blots and stigmas upon our Asylums! Nevertheless, it must be admitted that, as in hospitals, so in Lunatic Asylums, we prefer six fresh cases to the same case six times over, and in both establishments the frequent change of patients— like the constant renewal of blood discs in animal bodies, or like free trade in nations—is their very life and soul, by conferring the greatest amount of health and happiness upon the greatest possible number. By the majority of the public, an Asylum is regarded merely as a place of custody and security for those who are incapable of taking care of themselves, or who have been proved to be dangerous to themselves or others; this is not perhaps to be wondered at, since before the lunatic can be admitted into an Asylum, it has to be certified that he is dangerous, or unable to discriminate between right and wrong. Considered however in its proper light, an Asylum is an Hospital for the treatment of mental disease, but adapted to