II. The period of slaughter.--In the Middle Ages the treatment of lunatics was worthy only of the ages characterised as dark. A madman was worse treated than a mad dog. For twelve centuries lunatics were commonly put to death, and in most cases by burning at the stake. In France alone twenty thousand are said to have been burnt in a hundred years; and the same thing went on in every other country. Those who were not burnt wandered at large in a wretched condition, to die at last from exposure; or they were confined in dungeons, starved and cruelly maltreated. Ambrose Paré, the celebrated French surgeon, medical attendant of Francis I., fully believed that lunatics were possessed by the devil. “They may often be seen,” he says, “to change into goats, asses, dogs, wolves, crows, and frogs; they cause thunder and lightning, lift castles into the air, and fascinate the eye.” King Louis XIV. has been much reproached since his death as he was adulated during his lifetime. To him, in any case, is due the first movement against the cruel--the absolutely insane treatment of the insane. In 1670 a trial took place in Normandy which ended in the condemnation of seventeen people to the stake, either as lunatics or as sorcerers. A rat, it was sworn, had been seen talking to a child; and on the strength of this evidence everyone who could be brought into connection with the strange incident was sentenced to death. The king was indignant, and soon afterwards a decree was published forbidding trials of the kind in future. III. The period of torture.--Though no longer subject to death punishment by fire, lunatics were almost as badly off in the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth century as at an earlier time. Such asylums as existed in France and other countries up to the present century were entirely of a monastic kind; and it was not, as before mentioned, until the reign of Louis Philippe that any regular secular institution for the treatment of the insane was founded. The unhappy lunatics were probably happiest in those countries where least notice was taken of them; for not a century ago they were liable, when “cared for,” to copious bleeding, shower-baths, sudden frights, and rigid coercion. In some places they were chained and flogged at the changes of the moon, or they were placed under the charge of criminals, who set dogs on them and tortured them to death. The doctors, instead of checking these barbarities, encouraged them; and from time to time invented new ones. They it was who introduced the “circular swing” and “bath of surprise.” One torture, diabolically devised, was to lower the patient into a well, chain him there, and allow the water to rise gradually to his mouth in order to give a shock to his nerves. An unhappy man named Norris was in England, at the so-called Hospital of Bethlem, fixed to the wall by the neck and waist so that he could not move a foot or raise his arms; and, thus attached, he remained for twelve years.