Second annual report of the Suffolk Lunatic Asylum : December, 1839.

  • Suffolk Lunatic Asylum.
Date:
1840
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Second annual report of the Suffolk Lunatic Asylum : December, 1839. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    seldom or never found to do so ; this impatience and fretfulness being allied to their physical, their acquired, their uncontrollable, or contradicting dispositions. While, on the other hand, upon an accession of real disease, those whose ease and whose competence, and whose natural mildness and freedom from trouble, seem to place them aloof from even the suspicion of such an act, are suddenly and impetuously hurried on to it. “ I knew, myself,” said an intelligent Coroner, at a late memorable inquest, “a gent¬ leman, who was collector of a Musical Society, who had his pocket picked of some money be¬ longing to the friends of it. He told the society of his loss, and they believed it; but the cir¬ cumstance so preyed upon his mind, that on a sudden paroxysm of rage, he stabbed himself; and upon his recovery from the wound, he declared that he had no recollection whatever of having inflicted the injury.” Here was the want of consciousness, the loss of recollection, the absence of pain—Insanity. There is great difficulty in obtaining a know¬ ledge of the cause leading to the admission of a patient into an Asylum; this is felt every where: the assigned cause is not always the real one ; sometimes very little is known, and sometimes that little is concealed. Not only mistaken