Annual report of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the insane. 1882.

  • Royal Edinburgh Asylum.
Date:
[1883]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annual report of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the insane. 1882. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    29/78 (page 23)
    will object to such “ experiments on living beings ” but the cost. on any ground “ Experiments on living beings.” A public asylum for the insane is now one of the recognised parts of our complicated modern civilisation. Like all necessary parts of the body politic, it must confer as well as receive benefits. The place and pital. If it receives private patients, its sphere is widened, because it directly affects a larger area of society than a hospital. It pro¬ vides the conditions requisite for the recovery of a certain class of diseases. It therefore helps to restore working helpful members What it gives, back to society. It removes out of the way dangerous, offensive, and troublesome units. It stimulates benevolent and charitable feelings, or ought to do so, and would do so far more if more per¬ sons would overcome their prejudices, and take a more personal interest in its work and in its patients. It stops to some extent the propagation of disease. It serves as a field of experience and education for the medical profession. Without it the mental department of medicine would stand still. Under proper restric¬ tions, and accompanied by myself, medical students are here allowed to see typical cases among our charity and rate-paid pa¬ tients, so that they may be afterwards able to render more service to society in their professional capacity. The latest constituted University in the kingdom, the Royal University of Ireland, requires from all its medical graduates, before receiving their quali¬ fication to practise, that they shall have had three months clinical instruction in a hospital for the insane. This provision will pro¬ bably soon be required by all Universities and medical corpora¬ tions. How can a medical man treat rightly a case of mental disease, or have the knowledge to write a proper lunacy certificate, on which the liberty of a British subject is suspended, if he has never seen such a case before ? For these things it gives, the Asylum undoubtedly gets a good what it gets, deal from the public. It asks much money, and thus adds appre¬ ciably to the taxation of the country. It has a costly Government department for its supervision. All its officers and staff might conceivably be producing more for society than they do, if employed otherwise. It takes up the unpaid for time of its governing body.