The use of sedatives in insanity / by Geo. H. Savage.

  • Savage, George H. (George Henry), 1842-1921.
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The use of sedatives in insanity / by Geo. H. Savage. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    BY GEO. H. SAVAGE, M.D., Bctldem Royal Hospital. The earliest form of treatment of insanity, after the period when the insane were treated as outcasts or aliens, and as such were either killed or allowed to die of neglect and starvation, was restraint in one form or another; the chain, the cord, and the whip were the recognised influences which society used to prevent injury to its members, and possibly to allow the sufferer time to recover. As science, or at any rate as more elaborate therapeutic ideas were developed, the measures used were apparently less forcible, but were in reality as severe, and in many cases more disastrous. Dr. Wilks some years ago, in an address at Birmingham, said that for his part he could not see that there was much difference between knocking a violent patient down with morphine and knocking him down with the fists, and suggested that graduated prize-fighters might be arranged to produce insensibility of varying length and intensity. The asylum world was rather startled later on, when Dr. P. Davies wrote of medicinal restraint, and was inclined to repudiate the charge. I believe that very few medical officers used powerful drugs purely and simply as restraints, yet I am sure many used them as means of con- trolling, with the hope that quiet being established cure would follow. In this they were neither better nor worse than the physicians who restrained mechanically with the same object in view; indeed, for my own part, I would rather be bound than narcotised. Though asylum physicians may have erred very naturally in this direction, I am sure the general practitioner has done so