A letter to the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy : containing some strictures on the Act of Parliament, and observations on their report / by J. Haslam.

  • Haslam, John, 1764-1844.
Date:
1830
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter to the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy : containing some strictures on the Act of Parliament, and observations on their report / by J. Haslam. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    medical practitioner and his art with no extraordi¬ nary respect by having confided the treatment of an important disease to gentlemen who possess not the slightest claim to the exercise of those functions, by which it is to be alleviated. A total disregard of professional rank equally pervades the different clauses of the Bill, so that a Fellow or Licentiate of the College of Physicians is merely on a level with a person who states that he practised pharmacy before the year 1815, and who belongs to no college or medical corporation whatever. In all the learned professions gradations of rank are established—the medical Commissioners in your own Board are of the class of physicians, and the wisdom of such appointment is conspicuous, because difficult cases are not of infrequent occurrence, and the treatment of Insanity has been justly considered to be the peculiar province of the experienced physician. On this principle, and in the event of your Bill being amended, I may venture to suggest that, to every certificate which consigns an individual to an asylum for the insane, one of the subscribers ought to be a Fellow or Licentiate of the College. At present, the certificate itself is the mere dictum of the per¬ son who signs it; and when the Commissioners visit him in his seclusion, they are totally unacquainted r t