The old lunatic asylums of this country were objects of dread and repulsion. Severity was considered to be an absolute necessity in their management. “The affrighted visitors,” says Conolly,[17] “saw that many were furious ... and it never occurred to them that habitual severity was the real cause of the habitual fury.” New Bethlem in Moorfields two centuries ago was a place of chains, manacles, and stocks. Down to 1770 the inmates were exhibited to the public at a charge of twopence, afterwards reduced to one penny. The medical profession had become accustomed to neglect mental diseases, and to acquiesce in severe treatment. Cruelty became developed in ingenious forms. In some Continental asylums patients were terrified by the gradual ascent of water in a well in which they were chained. Machines were imagined by which a newly arrived lunatic could suddenly be raised to the top of a tower, and as suddenly lowered into a deep dark cavern; “if the patient could be made to alight among snakes and serpents, it would be better still.” A revolving chair was invented, in which the victim could be strapped and made to gyrate at the rate of one hundred revolutions per minute. This was eulogised as a potent means of quieting the unmanageable, and was supposed to induce the melancholy to take “a natural interest in the affairs of life.” We can only make this passing allusion to the way in which ingenuity was exhausted in devising methods of restraint and torture. Nothing could have been worse than the condition of the Bicêtre and the Salpêtrière, the two large asylums of Paris, when Pinel was in 1793 appointed to the former by Cousin, Thouret, and Cabanis, then newly appointed administrators of the Parisian hospitals. Damp, dark cells, infested by rats, contained dirt-coated beings whose only comfort was a little straw, chained, brutally ill-treated, and attended by brutal criminals. For nearly ten years previously Pinel’s attention had been directed to the treatment of the insane, and now, in spite of difficulties which officials threw in his way, he succeeded in loosening the chains and ameliorating the treatment of the majority of the patients. Yet his reforms nearly cost him his life. Rumours were spread accusing him of some evil motive in unchaining dangerous lunatics, and a mob one day seized him, and uttered the well-known terrible cry “_à la lanterne!_” An old soldier of the French Guard, once a lunatic, whom he had released from chains, cured, and employed in his own service, was appropriately the means of his rescue. Thus was philanthropy once more justified of her children.