LUNATIC ASYLUMS

To the Editors of the Sydney Morning Herald,



Sometimes the fury of the worst disease,

The hand by gentle stroking will appease, SOLON.

Gentlemen,—In Graunt's Natural and Political Observations on the Bills of Mortality about the year 1662, it is stated that the number of lunatics is small, being only 158 out of 229,250 persons, within the range of the authentic list ; or about one in 1450. I cannot speak to the average increase of insanity in proportion to the existing population in the period included within that date and the beginning of the present century ; but it is certain that the number of insane in England has become quadrupled during the last forty years ; and the misfortune seems to proceed in steady increase. Civilisation and refinement seem to be the fons et origo of this fast-spreading and direful affliction. Where it will stop, under the present conditions of human society, or how it will be arrested or cured by the inapplicable modes of treatment still pursued in some lunatic asylums, God alone knows.

We have reason to believe that thousands and tens of thousands of sane minds, or of intellects but slightly affected, have been driven into furious and hopeless mania by the atrocities practised in public and private Lunatic Asylums. Because it is not the insanity, but the degree and the character of the disease, on which the attention of the physician ought to be fixed. This luminous maxim was not known to the earlier physicians ; and many of the later medical superintendents of mad-houses reject it from motives not very creditable to their hearts. Hence, as I have said, thousands have fallen victims to ignorance and stupid indocility. Besides, in most Asylums in the last century, and in many places in the present, all was left to the tender mercies of keepers, whose conduct cannot always be known, and very seldom inquired into by their superiors, and who never allowed their sympathies and their love of human-kind to interfere with the inviolable obligations they owed to themselves. As often as a club of these worthies wished to enjoy a social tankard of beer, and a game at cards,—which were frequent wishes, and every one a law,—their usual maxim was, to guard against the possibility of interruption or disturbance during the celebration of their orgies; and to this end, their first precaution was to leg-lock, handcuff, and chain up their miserable wards by the neck to the cold wall ; or fix them down to the freezing, damp, filthy, stone floor of their cells ; and after settling this preliminary, they sought to secure tranquillity by a liberal application of the whip, the cudgel, and a fair allowance of hearty kicks, enforced with a gratuity of heartier curses on the souls and bodies of their wretched victims. This done, these honest and conscientious keepers — these pampered, overfed keepers, who fattened on the very wretches whom they were destroying, would sit down quietly and without fear, like men conscious of having performed a sacred duty men who never had occasion to grow palest the imputation of a crime ; and they would quaff their beer, and play their cards, and laugh and jest with impious raillery at the lamentable forms of affliction around and before them, and swear and laugh again,

————So loud, that all the hollow deep

Of hell resounded.

I assure you, gentlemen, although I confess these, and what I have already written on the subject, were intended as argumenta ad miseracordiam ; yet this picture is neither magnified nor diminished. I have neither exaggerated, nor

Set down aught in malice,

Examine for yourselves the practice modified, in a more modern dress, and exhibiting milder and more excuseable features ; if there can be excuse for professional ignorance, and a total renouncement of common sense.

Dr. Conolly has seen " humane English physicians daily contemplating helpless insane patients bound hand and foot, and neck and waist, in illness, in pain, and in the agonies of death, without one single touch of compunction, or the slightest approach to a feeling of acting either cruelly or unwisely. They thought it impossible to manage insane people in any other way." Such was the method of curing lunacy not many years ago, and I regret to say it is the method in many places still. It is a lamentable truth, that some of our contemporaries, even in the present year, perhaps the present day, treat insane patients, not as if they considered the disease incurable, but as if every human being in this deplorable condition was subject by law and justice to every mark of contempt and every species of brutality and cowardly torture. But waiving the inhumanity and the injustice of the system, the conduct of many superintendents, both of public and private mad-houses, is so directly opposite to the established principles of medical science, common sense, and the daily experience of mankind, that I can with difficulty believe they are less insane than the unfortunate creatures placed under their mismanagement. It is surely not unknown even to the mere insensate keeper, or the automaton professional routinist who knows no practice, and acknowledges no law in his art, but what he derived from his master, that the most savage and ferocious animals are tamed by kindness, and rendered tractable by soothing and caressing. It is monstrous that they should not have employed the same humane acts to subdue the tempestuous and unruly passions of their brother man ! Is man in the wildest tumult of his madness and fury less domitable than the fierce tenant of the forest ? Is the recovery of that inestimable treasure, the human intellect, a matter of less concern than the taming of a bear ? The latter question I leave to sensitive consciences : the former was answered, and set at rest for ever, by the courage and humanity of the elder Pinel, in the great French Bedlam, sixty years ago.—His foresight and consequent procedure were so remarkable, I must quote one of my former letters. The passage cannot become stale, at least to minds in unison with the inspired precept, LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR. It is nearly in the words of his nephew who records the acts.

He was struck with the injustice of keeping his patients chained in the dungeons of Bicetre. There were at that time upwards of 300 maniacs chained in the loathsome cells of the horrible Bedlam of France. Pinel formed the resolution of setting them free from their strict restraint, and he entreated permission of the Commune to that effect. He obtained the permission he sought, and " the philanthropist resolved speedily to liberate fifty of the number by way of experiment, and began by unchaining twelve of the most violent. The first man set at liberty was an English captain. He had been forty years in chains, and his history was forgotten by himself and all the world. His keepers approached him with dread ; he had killed one of their comrades by a blow with his manacles. Pinel entered his cell unattended, and accosted him in a kind and confiding manner, and told him that it was designed to give him the liberty of walking abroad, on condition that he "would put on a waistcoat that might confine his arms. The madman appeared to disbelieve : but he obeyed. His chains were removed, and the door of his cell was left open. Many times he raised himself and fell back ; his limbs gave way ; they had been ironed forty years. At length he was able to stand and to walk to the door of his dark cell, and to gaze with exclamations of wonder and delight at the beautiful sky. He spent the day in the enjoyment of his newly acquired privilege ; he was no more in bonds ; and during the two years of his further detention at Bicetre, he assisted in managing the house." The next case was that of a furious raving soldier, who was softened and subdued by the same means. No earthly gratification can approximate the delight that warms the heart on reading the history of this angelic man's labours. His success far surpassed his hopes. He had released fifty-three maniacs from their chains and the damp and dreary vaults of the prison in the space of a few days ; and tranquillity and harmony succeeded to the yells, vociferations, and clanking of chains ; and even the most ferocious madman became more tractable.

Could there be a more glorious or remarkable triumph of humanity and reason over barbarity and ignorance than is exhibited by these two cases particularly, which formed his coups d'essai. They bear damning witness against our wire-drawn caution and gothic brutality. Both these maniacs were subdued by kindness, and the confidence reposed in them : the one because a quiet inoffensive and useful assistant—the other an idolizer of his liberator, and clung to him with the fondest attachment that could be inspired by love and gratitude, during the remainder of his life. These clear testimonials of what must always be the natural and inevitable effects of mercy and wisdom, plead strongly against us who have neglected the beneficent lessons they have taught, in language that sounds of an awful responsibility. They glow in fearful characters on the portals of many of our modern bedlams.—The ardent eloquence of Lord Ashley has pronounced their doom; he has engraven upon their walls the, terrible Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.

IATPOΣ. Sydney, September 9.

 s.m.h. 11 September 1846,