Seventeenth annual report of the Somerset County Pauper Lunatic Asylum : from the 1st of January to the end of the year 1864.

  • Somerset County Pauper Lunatic Asylum.
Date:
1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Seventeenth annual report of the Somerset County Pauper Lunatic Asylum : from the 1st of January to the end of the year 1864. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    8/88 (page 4)
    The Chaplain, who has officiated eight years, and is reported by the Superintendent to have been kind and courteous to the patients, is lately deceased. It is recommended that Mr. Edgell be added to the Committee on its re-appointment. The Committee have much pleasure in expressing their confidence in Dr. Boyd, and their satisfaction with the conduct of the Officers and Attendants. (Signed) F. H. Dickinson, William F. Knatchbull, It. S. Allen, B,. King Meade King, It, Neville-Grenville, William Pinney, Edward A. Freeman. The following are the statements from Medical Journals referred to by the Chairman in his speech, when presenting the annual reports at the Court of Quarter Sessions:— (From the “ Medical Times and Gazette ’ of April 23rd, 1864, on “ Lunatic Dietaries.” We ought to treat the subject of lunatic asylum dietaries as a branch of hospital dietetics. Thus much being premised, we may proceed to say that up to a certain point the insane, as confined in asylums, are not all such as require the daily prescription of a special dietary. There is that in common writh the majority which enables the physician to lay down a dietary calculated for the use of all those who are free from specific com¬ plication, who are not in the usually-received sense “ill.” The insane are really the subjects of disease, whose most general character is depression of vital energy, weakness, or imperfect nutrition. Hence it is that the inmates of an asylum must be supplied with food not only nutritious in quality, but abundant in quantity. Not only must there be found thereat all that is needful for the maintenance of life and health of the healthy, but for the restoration of force in the debilitated. This is the physical, the chemical view, if you please, to take of the matter ; but there is another aspect in which it is to be regarded—namely, the psychical. Nothing is trivial in the arrangements made for the insane—so many are the paths pursued by the mind, so little to be anticipated the associations between external events and the consequent course of ideas in the morbid intellect. Whatever is calculated to inspire a feeling of disgust—whatever is inconsistent with cleanliness or decency—whatever is likely to shock the sensibilities of the class to which the patient belongs, should be religiously proscribed in an asylum for the insane ; and, on the other hand, whatever is fitted to inspire a notion of comfort, to promote cheerfulness, to foster the proprieties of