The seventieth annual report of James Murray's Royal Asylum Perth.

  • James Murray's Royal Asylum for Lunatics.
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The seventieth annual report of James Murray's Royal Asylum Perth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    8/46 (page 8)
    Causes of Insanity. private care ; and i after a period of residence in another asylum. Four were transferred from other Scottish asylums. Of the 45 admissions only 6 were found free from physical diseases more or less severe, and two died within a short time after reception here in consequence of the fatal and incurable maladies under which they laboured on admission. The average age on admission was 42*3 (compared with 40*5 in 1896), and 7 were over 60 years of age (compared with 3 in 1896). The causes of insanity, as discovered on ad¬ mission, presented no unusual features. It was ascertained that 18 were hereditarily predisposed to mental derangement, while 3 belonged to fami¬ lies of neurotic tendencies. This, of course, is not the whole truth. It constantly happens that mis¬ representations, and even false statements are made, so that the most careful investigations fail to elicit a trustworthy family history. In some cases the truth leaks out only after the lapse of years. I am not to maintain the cynical paradox that there can be no insanity without an insane heredity, in accordance with the ancient formula ex nihilo nihil fit, but it seems to me that such a statement would lie nearer the truth than the returns obtained in every-day practice. This has been widely recognized and fully discounted in regard to the patients of County Asylums, among whom ignorance and apathy may well be excused; but in our experience the failure is not infrequently attributable to deliberate perversion of facts. Yet, although the ostrich pushes his head well into the sand, his feathers are still endangered.