MY EXPERIENCES IN A LUNATIC ASYLUM LONDON: PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE AND PARLIAMENT STREET MY EXPERIENCES IN A LUNATIC ASYLUM _BY A SANE PATIENT_ 'Let us rise and revolt against those people, Lankin. Let us war with them and smite them utterly. It is to use against these, especially, that scorn and satire were invented' 'And the animal you attack,' says Lankin, 'is provided with a hide to defend him--it is a common ordinance of nature'--M. A. TITMARSH London CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY 1879 [_The right of translation is reserved_] MY EXPERIENCES IN A LUNATIC ASYLUM. I. It's a mad world, my masters. I suppose that the motto I have affixed to the first chapter of the brief history of a singular personal experience is by this time an accepted axiom. Was it in one of Mr. Sala's columns of gossip that I was reading the other day of the man of the pen who commented upon the imprisonment in an asylum of a brother of his craft merely by saying, 'What a fool he must be! For years I have been as mad as he, only I took care never to say so'? There are odd corners in the brains of most of us, filled with queer fancies which are as well kept out of sight; eccentricities, I suppose they may be called. The man who is so 'concentric' as to be innocent of peculiarities is a companion of a dull sort. But Heaven help us all when such things may be called, and treated as, madness. For, if all of us were used according to our deserts in that way, who should escape the modern substitutes for whipping? England would not contain the asylums that should be constructed, and might go far to deserve the Gravedigger's description of her for Hamlet's benefit: 'There the men are as mad as he.' Let me go a step further. There are few of us, perhaps, who have not seen something in our lives of the strange nervous disorders which have been generalised as 'hypochondria,' which are, in fact, I think, the different outcomes of a common affection--temporary exhaustion of brain. Beyond a certain point it becomes delirium, the wandering of weakness which is so closely connected with many forms of illness, both in the beginning and during the course and recovery. When the victims of delirium may be added to the eccentric members of society; when at any moment the certificates of any two doctors who may be utter strangers to the patient--acting under the instructions of friends who are frightened and perplexed, perhaps, and try to believe that they are 'doing for the best' (I leave out of consideration here the baser motives which, it is to be feared, come sometimes into play)--may condemn him to the worst form of false imprisonment, the death-in-life of a lunatic asylum, at a time when he is himself practically unconscious;--who is there amongst us who can for a moment believe himself safe? Death-in-life did I say? It is worse; for it is a life-in-life, worse than any conceivable form of death.