Disease of the mind / by Charles F. Folsom.

  • Folsom, Charles Follen, 1842-1907.
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Disease of the mind / by Charles F. Folsom. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    18/138 (page 6)
    under tlic tlioory of witchcnift and dcvilcraft. The Knights of Malta, at that time, received the insane with the other sick in their lios[)ilals. In 1751, a few benevolent gentlemen in London established the first asylum in modern times (St. Luke’s) for the care of the insane exclusively. From the first, there were separate wards for the curable and for the ineurable. At the very close of the last century, there were three cor- porate asylums and one public in the United States, and five public in England. The private asylums were also very few, that of the parson-doctor, Willis, in England, being the most celebrated. In fact, the reputation of Willis was so great that he was called to attend King George the Third in his second attack of mental disease in 1788. Ilis treatment of even so exalted a personage was arbitrary and dogmatic in the ex- treme. Mechanical restraint was liberally used, and the strait-jacket was one of the common means of discipline.” In his own asylum it must have been the .same, although for his more quiet patients he was in advance of his day, and depended to some extent on an excellent table, regular habits, general good health and agreeable occupation ; but he allowed his attendants to beat the more unruly * when they thought it necessiiry. The age was one of the most absolute dogmatism ; l>nt in- sanity and the phenomena of mind were thought to belong to the province of the theologian and the metaphysician, and their doffma was even more narrow than that of the doctors. Neither Iloflmann, Stahl nor Boerhaave had advanced the knowledge of insanity. Cullen in Scotland and Morgagni in Italy had begun accurate observations ; but not until John Hunter went to London, in 1748, was the inductive method of study in medicine fairly inaugurated, and he was so far in advance of his time that he never had an audience of twenty persons in all the years of his lecturing. Although ho was a man, who, for comprehensive and original research, comes immediately after Adam Smith, and must be placed far above any other philosopher whom Scotland has produced,”! his principle of careful deductions from recorded facts had * This was also permitted Ijy the regulations of “ Bedlam.” t Bueklc’s History of Civilization, II., p. 432.