Twenty-first annual report of the Suffolk Lunatic Asylum : December, 1858.

  • Suffolk Lunatic Asylum.
Date:
[1859]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Twenty-first annual report of the Suffolk Lunatic Asylum : December, 1858. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    day. There are again strong under-currents of feeling which sometimes manifest themselves with an intensity which would seem proportionate to the extent of other impressions apparently lost: we had to remove a picture which had been put up in the room of a female, who was the very peisoni- fication of the grotesque sympathetic. The picture was of a boy taking physic ; and whenever she saw it she burst into a flood of tears at the grimaces he made. A great deal of domestic work has been done this year, and much out-door improvement effected. The farm-yard has been vastly improved and enlarged; additional sheds built for winter stores, &c. and a very nice iron balustraded verandah made on the female side, by an alteration of a dark and disagreeable old covered way. A great many more rooms have been papered and painted, an improvement which had added not only to the comfort of the patients, but to their more cleanly habits : they are more pleased with their rooms and take pride in keeping their neatness and cleanliness unsoiled. We hope, as the spring advances, to encourage the patients in the culture of flowers and plants; and to follow out a practice, very common in Germany, of making natural window curtains, by festoons of Italian ivy. When we are able to obtain additional work shops, we hope to instruct some of the patients in useful and more ornamental pursuits, and in summing up our chief requirements now, we feel quite disposed to be satisfied in tracing our descent from a very low origin, and to leave it instanced only in the double demand of the descendants of the horse leech, “give give,” and say, yive us the means for improving our present accommodation, and yive us land. The spirit of emulation amongst the patients generally, has been excited in their late horticultural pursuits : the products including to their great delight an Australian gourd, we believe of unequalled dimensions ; being twelve stone minus fib. in weight, and seven feet in circumference. It was an outward and visible foretaste of an inward natural feast. The fellow