Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British IslesTuke, Daniel Hack
History
Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles
Tuke, Daniel Hack
Mental health laws -- Great Britain; Mental illness -- Great Britain; Mentally ill -- Care; Psychiatric hospitals -- Great Britain
During the meeting of the International Medical Congress, 1881, a party
of distinguished men from other lands visited Broadmoor, including MM.
Foville and Motet, Professors Hitchcock, Ball, Tamburini, Dr. Müller,
and Dr. Whitmer. We shall always remember the day with pleasure. One
result was an interesting narrative of the visit by M. Motet of Paris.
We met at "Waterloo," and it was gratifying to think of the different
feelings under which representatives of the French and English
assembled, from those experienced on the battle-field to which the
station owes its name.
FOOTNOTES:
[210] Dr. William Orange.
[211] _Journal of the Statistical Society_, vol. xxxviii. (Guy).
Appendix K II.
[212] For detailed account of the French law, which in some particulars
may require greater safeguards, see article by the author, "Mental
Experts and Criminal Responsibility," _Journal of Mental Science_,
edited by Dr. D. Hack Tuke and Dr. George H. Savage, April, 1882. For
more information respecting criminal lunatics, see Appendix L.
CHAPTER VII.
OUR CHANCERY LUNATICS.
Of the relations of lunatics to that Court which Dickens describes as
having its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, its
worn-out lunatic in every mad-house, and its dead in every churchyard,
we must briefly speak, and in many respects speak favourably. It may
have been true that "the Court of Chancery gives to moneyed might the
means abundantly of wearying out the right; so exhausts finances,
patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart;
that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would
not give--who does not often give--the warning, 'Suffer any wrong that
can be done you, rather than come here!'" But whatever this "most
pestilent of hoary sinners" may have been in the past, it has, through
its Lord Chancellor's Visitors, performed its duty towards its "worn-out
lunatics," not only "in every mad-house," but in many a home in which
they enjoy as much liberty as possible, while the property of which they
are incompetent to take charge, is carefully administered by the Lord
Chancellor. In his Address at the eighth section of the International
Congress, Dr. Lockhart Robertson pointed out that 34.6 per cent. of the
Chancery lunatics are treated in private dwellings. Hence 65.4 per cent.
are in asylums--a striking contrast to 94 per cent. of private patients
in asylums under the Lunacy Commissioners. Dr. Robertson concludes that
some 30 per cent. of these are, therefore, in asylums needlessly, and
hence wrongly. The fact is important, and will attract, it is to be
hoped, more attention than hitherto, although I can hardly see that it
follows that all these patients referred to are "wrongly confined," or
would be better elsewhere. I would, however, reiterate what has been
insisted upon in a former chapter, that, essential as asylums are, a
large number of patients may be comfortably placed under other and less
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