In the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ of 1765[690] we read of the private asylums that “persons were taken forcibly to these houses without any authority, instantly seized by a set of inhuman ruffians trained up to this barbarous profession, stripped naked, and conveyed to a dark room.” So ignorant were the doctors of those days as to the nature of insanity that the harsh cruelties practised on private patients were carried out even upon the king. Of the eighteenth-century practice Mr. Massie has written:[691] “Mental disease was at that time a branch of art little understood, and the specific treatment of lunatics was worthy of the barbarous age of medicine. The unhappy patient” (King George III.) “upon whom this most terrible visitation of Heaven had fallen, was no longer dealt with as a human being. His body was immediately enclosed in a machine, which left it no liberty of motion. He was sometimes chained to a staple. He was frequently beaten and starved, and at least he was kept in subjection by menacing and violent language.” That, like most lunatics, he was very annoying is certain; he once talked for nineteen hours unceasing. But all his troubles were intensified by ill-treatment;[692] they left him to be knocked about by a German servant,[693] and the first doctors kept him even from his own children, at which the poor old man complained “very heavily.”[694] Such, then, was the orthodox treatment applied against the highest in the land. But the worst deeds were done behind thick walls. “Sane people,” says Beach,[695] writing of private establishments, “were frequently confined in these asylums, for persons frequently availed themselves of the facilities[696] then in use in order to get rid of a troublesome relative or to obtain some selfish object.” And what of the really mad?[697]—irritable, violent, irrational, helpless, often with as little control over the functions of the body as on the workings of the mind. We can imagine what their state became when left in the hands of ignorant practitioners and brutal attendants, with chains and instruments of restraint convenient and ready. Screened off from all kith and kin they writhed with sores and rotted in ordure.[698] Sometimes—mostly on Monday mornings after the Sabbath rest and accumulations—they might be carried out into a yard[698] to be mopped and soused from pails in the coldest weather.[699]