INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. WHEN we consider the rapid advances which our knowledge of insanity, viewed in the light of a disease of a derangement of the physical structure, has been making within the last few years-it cannot fail to be a source of surprise and regret that the laws regulating legal the relations of the insane may with justice be said to be almost at a stand still, more especially in this country. The author of the work to which the present essay is prefixed, seems disposed to throw the blame of this partly on the apathy of the medical profession, and partly on the prejudices and erroneous notions so long entertained by the public concerning the nature of this affection. When we examine into the present state of our Lunatic Asylums, and contrast it with what it was some years since, we cannot but be struck with the vast improvement which has taken place in the treatment, both medical and moral, of this unfortunate class of persons. If we refer to the Reports of the Select Committees appointed some years since to consider the provision to be made for the better regulation of madhouses in England, and the evidence a obtained on these occasions concerning the condition and treatment of the unfortunate inmates of these asylums, the enormities disclosed to our view are truly horrifying. The question which the Committee of the House of Commons had to investigate on these occasions was, whether a large proportion of these unfortunate persons, comprehending individuals of almost every rank in society, should be restored to the condition of human beings, or left to languish under sufferings that have no parallel but in the atrocities of a slave ship, or the dungeons of the Inquisition. Stripes, fetters, cold, darkness, solitude the absence of every bodily comfort and mental enjoyment-have been too long the established discipline of receptacles for the insane: and the unhappy lunatic, already suffering under the most awful visitation to which our nature is exposed, was the victim of this complicated misery-not incidentally for hours, days, or weeks-but in general for the whole term of his wretched existence. We will even on a very cursory review of the Minutes of Evidence elicited on several occasions find that the period is not very remote when lunatics were regarded as beings unsusceptible of mental enjoyment, or of bodily pain-and accordingly consigned, without remorse, to prisons under the name of madhouses-in the contrivance of which nothing seems to have been considered, but how to inclose the victim of insanity in a cell, and to cover his misery from the light of day.* * Edinb. Review, vol. xxviii. 1817. It must be admitted that there are few, if any, questions connected with the science of medicine so eminently deserving the patient and persevering inquiries of the medical philosopher, or that come home more closely to all classes and conditions of men, than the subject of insanity. Until very lately it was viewed as a disease over which medicine could exert but little control, and the asylums to which its wretched victims were consigned were established as receptacles, where, without fear of offending the public eye, they might drag on a few years of miserable existence, rather than with a hope or prospect of ultimate recovery. The wretched and degraded state to which some of the fairest portions of our fellow creatures have for a succession of years, we might almost say, ages, been there reduced, by the cruel and absurd notions which then prevailed on general treatment, are revolting to our finer feelings, and it cannot fail to afford unmingled satisfaction to contrast the past and present state of those asylums.* Thanks to the untiring labours of the physicians of the present day, we can now turn from those_revolting scenes to others, far more cheering. Insanity has, of late, been stripped of many of those terrors which, in less enlightened times, consigned its unhappy victims either to perpetual imprisonment, or the less objectionable evil, premature death, from the treatment to which they were subjected. They are now no longer handed over, on the fiat of an apothe * Foreign Quarterly, vol. xx. |