Report of the Committee of Visitors of the Lunatic Asylum for the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire : presented at the Epiphany quarter sessions for the respective ridings, 1855 together with the superintendent's eighth annual report, read at the Easter sessions, 1855 and an account of the receipts and payments to the end of the year, 1854 / North and East Ridings of Yorkshire Lunatic Asylum.

  • North and East Ridings of Yorkshire Lunatic Asylum.
Date:
1855
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the Committee of Visitors of the Lunatic Asylum for the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire : presented at the Epiphany quarter sessions for the respective ridings, 1855 together with the superintendent's eighth annual report, read at the Easter sessions, 1855 and an account of the receipts and payments to the end of the year, 1854 / North and East Ridings of Yorkshire Lunatic Asylum. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    7/28 (page 7)
    an infinity of predisposing and mystic agencies, the more palpable evils of intemperance, over-anxiety, mistaken religious zeal, dissapointed affection, losses, grief, poverty and impaired powers of health; demoralizing personal habits of both sexes, and probably more than any one of these causes taken singly, the descent of hereditary taint. This humiliating legacy left to posterity is added to and embit¬ tered generation after generation. There is now in this Asylum a very dangerous class of patients, who when young were probably merely looked upon by their relations, friends, neighbours and parish authorities, as silly, weak- minded or fitty—-as is the common name for Epilepsy—and who became fathers and mothers prior to the outbreak of their more matured mischief and violence, or too evident acts of gross indecency or the threatening character of their doings; whose pitiable offspring are, in all likelihood, destined to still further augment the number of insane persons and to provide forth¬ coming inmates for this Asylum. Enough has been said on this and on former occasions to excite in the minds of Magistrates, Clergymen, Medical Officers, Guardians, Overseers, Relieving Officers, Friends and Neighbours, an enquiry as to the only humane and proper course to be adopted, whenever any cases of unsoundness of mind come before their notice or are reported to them ; for by promptitude of action alone, can the requirements of the law or humanity be satisfied, or can recovery be expected, or on the other hand, can an arrest or check be put upon the growth of our worst of national and social calamities, defiling and con¬ taminating the best and purest blood; and too often dragging within its clutches, the affluent to become poor and the poor to become paupers. Before quitting this part of my Report I will briefly allude to a class of Institutions springing up here and there devoted to the care of Idiots alone. Great and urgent as is the call upon our energies and sympathies, for these deplorable specimens of our race, I cannot but doubt the wisdom of collecting them in masses, separate from the other insane; who, when properly taught, make compassionate and watchful attendants. The patience and pains¬ taking even of the furious, when guided by instructing and forbearing monitors, are examples of the tenacity with which original goodness of disposition clings to the individuals amidst the mental turmoil, and is brought from the concealment to which the coarser and ungenial infliction of estrangement had consigned a nature otherwise kind, gentle and ready. The Commissioners in Lunacy deem such instances worthy of record, and as they had heretofore witnessed the violent conduct of, and the harsh treatment to which two old standing patients had been for many consecutive years subjected; and observing a