With regard to the serious accusations so often made {378} against the people of the Middle Ages for their cruelty to the insane, not much apology will be needed by those who know anything about the treatment of the insane, even in quite recent times. Measures of rigid restraint were employed for dangerous cases. Patients who had shown manifestations of violence were likely to be chained. Severe and unusual punishments were sometimes inflicted. Of all this there is no doubt. Abuses crept into institutions. The insane were sometimes brutally treated or hideously neglected. These, however, are objections that can be urged against our system of taking care of the insane in many places even at the present day. In certain states, in order to lessen the expense of caring for the insane, they are kept in departments in the Poor Houses, and every now and then a legislative committee of investigation tells the story of appalling evils that have been discovered. It was not because they thought that possessed people deserved punishment, nor because they hoped thus to get the devils to go out of them, that the medieval generations allowed such things in their asylums, but because human nature will neglect its duties toward the ailing unless carefully superintended, and because regular attendants become hardened in their feelings sooner or later, when they serve only for pay, and the result always is the abuse of patients. In proportion to the number of patients cared for, there was much more need for restraint in those old days than at present. As a rule, during the Middle Ages prisons and asylums were few. Only the violently insane, who already had actually committed some serious crime or threatened to, were kept in the asylums. For these restraint is needed even at the present {379} time. We have learned to apply milder measures by employing many more attendants, but even that has come only in the last generation or two. The milder cases of insanity were not kept in asylums, but were allowed to wander about the country, or were cared for in their families with a devotion of which one finds no example at the present time; or if the insane person belonged to a noble family, very often the patient was kept in the house of a retainer and gently cared for. The fact that the milder cases were allowed to wander about the country might seem to be dangerous, but is not so serious as is ordinarily thought. Only a limited number of insane patients are likely to be violent, and these, as a rule, show manifestations of it early in the history of their affection. It was the frequent meeting with these harmless insane, as they were to be encountered in the many places through which he wandered professionally in England, that enabled Shakespeare to make his pictures of insane characters so true to life, that even at the present day we are able to recognize from his marvelous description exactly the form of insanity that was present.