Sixteenth report of the Derbyshire County Pauper Lunatic Asylum.

  • Derbyshire County Pauper Lunatic Asylum.
Date:
[1868?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sixteenth report of the Derbyshire County Pauper Lunatic Asylum. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The notes of exclamation, and the italics, are copied faithfully from this mistaken, and mischievous production of “ The Dublin Tract Repository,” mistaken and mischievous, because whatever tends to remove faith and hope from the human soul is as contrary to the Divine teachings of the Gospel, as it is inimical to the recovery of individuals suffering from bodily disease. These Melancholic Patients have had one character common to all—namely, a very enfeebled condition of bodily health ; this debility having been induced in a few by childbirth, and excessive lactation ; in more, from improper, or defective food, intemperance, crowded habitations, anxiety, and unhealthful occupations, but in most it was an inheritance derived from parents, themselves un¬ healthy, from the operation of causes described above. Insanity—as now seen—in the larger of our County Pauper Asylums, is the out-shoot of a degenerate physical condition, the manifestation of a long series of deteriorating influences, intro¬ duced and sustained by the great development of our manufac¬ turing industry, and by the crowded town-life, with all the concomitant circumstances of drunkenness, syphilitic diseases, dissolute companionship, and of vitiated air in hot and crowded workshops, which it too often involves. Insanity has increased, is increasing, and, with the present conditions of our national life, will continue to increase, until physical education, and the definite and immutable relations which exist between man and the external world are more studied, i.e., until the physical and organic laws of his being are understood, and acted upon, as reverentially and consci¬ entiously, as are those other Divine ordinances, which have been handed down to us, through the medium of Inspiration. When this Asylum was first opened in 1851, there were 12,059 Pauper Lunatics, in the Asylums of the United Kingdom ; there are now upwards of 24,995 in these Institutions, or, an excess of nearly nine hundred (877) over double the number, at that time to be pro¬ vided for; and at this moment most of the Institutions of the counties of Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Middlesex are full, and in the country generally, hundreds of lunatics are excluded from appro, priate treatment in the County Asylums for want of room. This is