Annual report of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the year 1848.

  • Royal Edinburgh Asylum.
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annual report of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the year 1848. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    18/36 (page 18)
    Admissions. Idiocy. Puerperal Mania. Lethal responsi bility of tiie In sane. Here we have one case of congenital idiocy added to the sma number in the House, and to the small number, I may also sat for whom the public have as yet thought it necessary to provio an Asylum. The efforts making abroad of late years, and moi recently, in London, to improve and even to cure these muc: neglected objects of sympathy, may lead, it is to be hoped er long, to some plan for a suitable Asylum for them in Scotland; or for their removal at least from the public highway or th work-house to our Hospitals for the Insane, where, at a prope age, and by proper treatment, their imperfect mental and physi cal organs may be duly exercised and developed, so as to elevatl them if not to the standard of sanity, at least to a sphere c usefulness and enjoyment. The number admitted labouring under puerperal mania ex ceeds that of any former year. One of these cases illustrate: very forcibly the special importance, in this form of insanity, o early removal from home to an Asylum. In the female referret to, well marked symptoms of mental derangement were mani fested soon after the birth of her child, and continued to shev themselves in occasional outbursts of passion, threatenings, sul lenness, and irritability. Yet she was left alone with her chil dren, and but imperfectly watched, until at last, under a sudd.ei impulse, she destroyed her infant, and made an attempt upoi her own life. This case suggests other very serious reflections After her admission she remained calm and rational, exhibitet no delusions or paroxysms of excitement,—she conducted her self with perfect propriety, and it would have been extremel; difficult for any one, not knowing her previous history, to hav< detected a trace of mental derangement. I cannot help asking the question, had the child been illegitimate, or had its deatl occurred in circumstances of any kind which were calculated t( excite suspicion, how would it have fared with this female ha( she been placed at the bar of our public tribunals? I shall no attempt to debate such questions in this brief abstract of th< yearly history of the Asylum ; but the reflections suggested b; this case remind me of others which I would be wanting in m; duty to the public were I not to put on record here, to be com pared with similar ones reported by some of the most distiii guished medical jurists, but for which no place has yet beer found in the legal definitions of this disease. Such a case is tin