The report of the Committee of Visitors and Medical Superintendent of the Devon County Lunatic Asylum.

  • Devon County Lunatic Asylum.
Date:
1862
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The report of the Committee of Visitors and Medical Superintendent of the Devon County Lunatic Asylum. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    6/28 (page 8)
    in women than in men, whicW®artly explains the greater mortality in the latter sex. The number of patients who die of phthisis is always a source of peculiar anxiety, inasmuch as the development of this disease may be regarded as a test of the sanitary condi¬ tions of an institution ; some of the patients who are carried off by it are indeed admitted with the disease already developed, and sometimes far advanced ; others are admitted with the seeds of the disease in the constitution, which the progress of time would unde Jkw^ircumstances bring to maturity. But, in a certain nuirBBTof cases, patients long resident in an asylum pass from a state of good bodily health into one of tubercular degeneration from influences whid^they experience, but from which they ought to be guarded drSBg the time that they are emphatically placed under medical care and treat¬ ment ; of these influences the bad air of over-crowded dormitories is unquestionably the most potent, and although it is one from which the poor do not escape in their own close and narrow sleeping rooms, it is yet an anti-hygienic condition to which the patients in an hospital ought never to be exposed. An over-crowded condition of an asylum, which is an hospital for the insane, is the worst possible condition in which it can be placed both for the physical and moral welfare of its inmates. But, in addition to this cause of consumption acting directly upon the body, there is one which may act upon it through the mind, namely—the influence of a monotonous and cheerless existence, which a long continued residence within the walls of an asylum is apt to become to patients of a certain mental constitution ; not only therefore are efforts made to relieve the monotony of a forced detention for the sake of those patients whose malady admits the reception of curative influences, but also for the sake of the hopelessly insane, ought proper efforts Wbe made to stimulate the flagging interest, and to give colour i^a dreary life. •One patient died of ovarian dropsy, at the age of sixty- three ; twelve years ago, in this asylum, she had been tapped, and five gallons of fluid removed from the tumour, which, contrary to the rule in these cases, had not refilled until this year, when the patient was too old and feeble to justify the repetition of the operation. Only one patient has die(J of apoplexy, occurring within the asylum, but three others have died of the results of apopletic attacks, which occurred before their admission into the asylum. These cases, interesting both in a medical and medico-legal point of view, are not rare ; apoplexy, as is well known, fre-