Annual report of the Royal Lunatic Asylum of Aberdeen, for the year ending 31st March, 1857.

  • Royal Lunatic Asylum of Aberdeen (Aberdeen, Scotland)
Date:
1857
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annual report of the Royal Lunatic Asylum of Aberdeen, for the year ending 31st March, 1857. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    which had not one single representative of the manage¬ ment or of the officials before their court of examination ; and which has, we take leave to say, failed to furnish a strictly accurate representation, at least in so far as some of the matters of this Asylum are dealt witli by them. When the attention of Parliament was claimed to this document, it was asserted in the Commons by Colonel Sykes, himself formerly an English Lunacy Commis¬ sioner, and well acquainted with the subject, that a better Hospital, as he knew, than the Aberdeen Asylum was not to be found anywhere. This Asylum was one of the earliest to adopt the modern non-restraint treatment, and it has hitherto carried it out fully, honestly, and success¬ fully, without the substitution of prolonged seclusion or other modes of harsh treatment. No modes of cure or palliation of the disease, of a rational and approved kind, which have been at any time introduced, have been over¬ looked. Recently, every year almost has improved the accommodations of the Asylum, enlarged its grounds, or added to the comforts and enjoyments of its in-dwellers. It has not followed in the wake of others, but kept going with the times. The patients have had a great amount of liberty within the Hospital grounds ; with such ex¬ tended freedom beyond them as has been thought con¬ sistent with the close neighbourhood of the town, and a due consideration of the condition of the patients them¬ selves and the connections of many of them with the lo¬ cality. They have been kept occupied in about the same 4 degree as in the better Asylums, but they never have been kept immured for lengthened times within doors at work, nor has any attempt been made to get them to task 1*2