Mechanical and other employments for patients in the British lunatic asylums / by Edward Jarvis ; read before the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane.

  • Jarvis, Edward, 1803-1884.
Date:
[1863?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Mechanical and other employments for patients in the British lunatic asylums / by Edward Jarvis ; read before the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    of furniture, bedding, and clothing, three-fifths of the original stock of bedding and clothing, and nearly two-fifths of the original furniture have been made entirely by the attendants and patients, beside which all the repairs of the asylum and a great many important additions and alterations, together with the cultivation of the land and formation of the pleasure grounds and airing courts, were last year executed by the same people, without any external aid whatever. Other reports speak of furniture, bed-steads, tables, chairs, ploughs, wheelbarrows, harrows, forks, &c, made by the patients. Some do even more than to supply their own wants. Staf- fordshire Asylum supplied another with shoes. The Wake- field Asylum does the washing for a training college. Almost all the furniture, chairs, bed-steads, mattresses, tables, ward- robes, bureaus, almost all needed articles that are usually made in shops were made in the school for idiots at Kedhill, for a new insane asylum of about four hundred patients. The inmates of this idiot establishment include some of higher grade of intellect than similar institutions of the United States. Some are apparently not congenital idiots, but demented; some are merely simpletons. But they all, (as others of dis- ordered or imperfect minds,) require1 teaching and direction; yet that school is provided with a great variety of mechanic shops, and many kinds of articles, some of nice workmanship, are made there. The pupils in the Massachusetts school for idiots at Boston, make brooms, mats and shoes, which are good of their kind, and find a ready sale in the market, and thus they add some- thing to the income of the establishment. This system of employing men in the mechanic arts has been so long in operation in Great Britain, that it has ceased to be an experiment, but is accepted as a settled principle, so that the projectors of new asylums, include workshops, in their original plan, and provide them as certainly as they do lodging rooms and kitchens. These shops have become an essential part of the means of managing the patients. Dr. Cleaton, Super- intendent of the Rainhill Asylum, near Liverpool, says, I am fully persuaded that, next to the disuse of mechanical restraint,