A treatise on the medical jurisprudence of insanity / by I. Ray ; with an introductory essay by D. Spillan.

  • Ray, Isaac, 1807-1881.
Date:
1839
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on the medical jurisprudence of insanity / by I. Ray ; with an introductory essay by D. Spillan. 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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    It must be admitted that tliere are few, if any, questions connected with the science of medicine so eminently deserving the patient and per- severing inquiries of the medical philosopher, or that come home more closely to all classes and conditions of men, than the subject of insanity. Until very lately it was viewed as a disease over which medicine could exert but little control, and the asylums to which its wretched victims were consigned were estabhshed as receptacles, where, without fear of offending the public eye, they might drag on a few years of miserable existence, rather than with a hope or prospect of ultimate recovery. The wretched and de- graded state to which some of the fairest por- tions of our fellow creatures have for a succes- sion of years, we might almost say, ages, been there reduced, by the cruel and absurd notions whieh then prevailed on general treatment, are revolting to our finer feehngs, and it cannot fail to afford unmingled satisfaction to contrast the past and present state of those asylums.* _ Thanks to the untiring labours of the phy- sicians of the present day, we can now turn from those revolting scenes to others, far more cheering. Insanity has, of late, been stripped of many of those terrors which, in less enlightened timesj consigned its unhappy victims either to perpetual imprisonment, or the less objection- able evil, premature death, from the treatment to which they were subjected. They are now no longer hande(l over, on the fiat of an apothe- * Foreign Quarterly, vol. xx.