The twenty-second report of the Committee of Visitors of the County Lunatic Asylum at Hanwell : January quarter sessions, 1867 / [Middlesex County Lunatic Asylum].

  • Middlesex Lunatic Asylum at Hanwell.
Date:
1867
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The twenty-second report of the Committee of Visitors of the County Lunatic Asylum at Hanwell : January quarter sessions, 1867 / [Middlesex County Lunatic Asylum]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    if possible, for chronic cases, not recent, but requiring special medical treatment in an Asylum, at the earliest possible moment, by the removal of quiet and harmless, imbecile and idiotic Patients to Workhouses. Upon this subject the Commissioners in Lunacy in their Eighteenth Eeport observe —a that while every added year’s experience confirms them in the opinion, that where Lunatics detained in Workhouses are of such kind and number as to require wards for their accommodation apart from the inmates, the result is disadvantageous ; on the other hand, there is a class of Patients among the idiotic and weak minded, whose quiet habits and tractable dis¬ positions, not only permit of their living in all respects with the ordinary Paupers of Workhouses, but even render them very often the most trustworthy and useful of all the inmates in employment about the Houses.” They add— “ In very many of the smaller Country Workhouses, where the practice is encouraged of mixing them with the sane, and, as far as possible, of employing them, the result is £0 satisfactory in all respects that their condition is, in our opinion, even preferable to that of the same class in some well ordered Asylums.” In this Asylum, Patients of this character are in very considerable numbers. The early removal of such of them as could be so taken care of in the Workhouses, and there¬ fore properly removed would, to the same extent, have left vacant accommodation for the same numbers now in the Workhouses, but requiring very-different care and direct medical treatment. It would then have remained for consideration what further measures were required.