Quis custodiet custodes?

Date:
[1876]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Quis custodiet custodes?. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    sceptically at all this, to doubt that the reign of humanity is twice blessed, or to set any limits to the powers of nature or of moral medicine. But I am sadly perplexed when there comes, through precisely the same channels, the hope-inspiring and the bloodstained streams almost mingling together, the following facts:—1. That within a few months an attendant was killed by a lunatic in Leicester Asylum ; 2. That one lunatic killed another in Durham County Asylum; 3. That a lunatic was killed in Greenock Poorhouse Asylum, and that an attendant was accused of killing him ; and 4. That a lunatic was reported to have had his ribs fractured, &c., by an attendant in Northwoods Asylum, both being intoxicated at the time, the assailant being subsequently committed, tried, and sentenced in the mitigated penalties of a fine of I5l. and two months’ imprisonment. Now, my object is not to attribute the slightest degree of culpability, malpractice, or misadventure to any- one connected with the above deplorable accidents, but simply < to show that there must have been struggle, violence, fury, ferocity previous to the deathblow. Nor, in adverting to 160 instances of accidents, including several suicides, stated to have occurred within the safe and sacred precincts of asylums in Scotland in 1874-75, in the Annual Report of the Commissioners—which is the only record of such important data which we know of—would we breathe or harbour the suspicion that there was either negligence, or carelessness, or inadvertence, or the absence of such precautions as might have prevented fractures and blows and burns, as our only wish is to direct attention to the sad evidence afforded that the Millennium has not yet arrived in Bedlam. In a report, from a person rather pedantically designated “ the Lancet Commissioner,” on Brookwood Asylum, in No. 23 of the Lancet (4th December 1875), there is a great deal of well- intended but certainly illogical commendation of the minimisa- tion of seclusion even as a means of treatment. I have always conceived that the morbid as well as the immature mind could be governed and guided to self-control and obedience to recognised rules by a certain amount of restriction, solitude, privations curatively imposed ; that the insane should be treated and talked to as if they were insane ; that it is of vast importance to convince them that they are in a lunatic asylum ; that they are sufferers from a grievous disease; that all around is intended to be remedial; that seclusion is not penal, but protective against light, sounds, provocations, violence, and their own passions. There are likewise in the same article many romantic descrip- tions of “embellishments,” “flower-stands,” “pianos,” “wall- paper, floorcloth, and colour.” The reporter must infallibly