Annual report of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the insane. 1876.

  • Royal Edinburgh Asylum.
Date:
[1877]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annual report of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the insane. 1876. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    22/72 (page 18)
    high, viz., 5 cases, in our list; but I find, on an examination of those cases, that four of the five had the disease on admission, and died at periods of from twelve to thirty-nine days after com¬ ing into the institution. Apoplexy was unusually common (4 cases), and I need scarcely say that this was unpreventible. Consumption was less common (8 cases) than it used to be. It is by an examination of the length of time the patients who died had been in the house before death, that most light is thrown on the mortality. I find that 42 out of the 82 died within six months of admission. Now, our admissions this year were un¬ usually numerous, and, as I mentioned, 100 of them had distinct bodily diseases of a serious nature when they arrived. A com¬ parison with the three previous years shows, that only an average of 20 patients died within the first six months of admission, so that the extra mortality of this year is seen to have taken place entirely among the patients who had been in the Asylum less than six months. This, taken along with the previous fact of so many of the new admissions of the year suffering from those serious bodily diseases, makes it quite certain that the explanation and cause of the excess of death of this year was the fact of the great number of patients admitted in such a condition, that they must die soon. I find that 12 of the 22 cases of General Paralysis died within six months of admission, 4 of the 8 deaths from Consumption, 3 of the 6 from Heart Disease, and 2 of the 4 from Apoplexy within that time; showing clearly that this year we have not only had sent to us more than the usual number of cases with fatal diseases or their seeds, but that in many of these patients the diseases had advanced so far, or were so severe in their character, that death resulted very quickly. It may seem unnecessary to have taken up so much time to discover the reason why our per centage of deaths was slightly over the average, but I am quite sure of the importance of a ques¬ tion of this kind. A survey of the ages of the patients left in the Asylum at the end of the year is interesting, not only as bearing on the probable