[17] “Treatment of the Insane without Mechanical Restraints,” 1856. [18] For details of the exposure of 1813 and 1814, see “A History of the York Asylum,” York, 1815. [19] For a description of the state of Bethlem Hospital in 1815, see Conolly’s work above cited, pp. 26-29. In making this record Conolly says, “Nothing can more forcibly illustrate the hardening effect of being habitual witnesses of cruelty, and the process which the heart of man undergoes when allowed to exercise irresponsible power. Partly from custom, and partly from indifference, and partly from fear, even physicians not particularly chargeable with inhumanity used formerly to see patients in every form of irritating restraint, and leave them as they found them. _Such facts justify the extremest jealousy of admitting the slightest occasional appliance of mechanical restraints in any asylum. Once admitted, under whatever pretext, and every abuse will follow in time._” [20] Memoir of John Conolly, M.D., D.C.L., by Sir James Clark, Bart., 1869; very ill-arranged. CHAPTER XXV. _EMINENT SPECIALISTS._ _SIR ERASMUS WILSON AND SKIN DISEASES; MORELL MACKENZIE AND THROAT DISEASES; COBBOLD AND INTERNAL PARASITES._ Specialisation is decreed by the will of the public as much as by that of the practitioner. This is true of many professions besides those of medicine. Although the general discernment has always recognised the ability of men with powers of the universal type, these men are rare, and there is a strong tendency to believe that a man cannot be master of the whole field of a science, but may more probably be master of a portion of it. Again, with hawk eye the people who want to be cured of disease mark and then swoop down upon men who appear to them specially capable in one department of medical practice, and no denunciation of specialism, no drawing back on the part of the physician, will avail against this natural selection. The man to whom crowds of patients of one kind flock naturally becomes specially skilled in dealing with them: and it is impossible to stem the tide by saying that such ought not to be the case. Specialism has been carried to a surprising extent in America, when Dr. Morell Mackenzie informs us, in his article on “Specialism in Medicine,”[21] it would be almost impossible to find a city with ten thousand inhabitants in which there are not three or four specialists; whilst in a city of one hundred and thirty thousand inhabitants, thirteen specialists were found exclusively engaged in treating throat diseases.