Sixteenth annual report of the Somerset County Pauper Lunatic Asylum : from the 1st of January to the end of the year 1863.

  • Somerset County Pauper Lunatic Asylum.
Date:
1864
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sixteenth annual report of the Somerset County Pauper Lunatic Asylum : from the 1st of January to the end of the year 1863. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    measure), at a distance from the asylum; placing patients in detached cottages or farm buildings, contiguous to the asylum, erecting block buildings in asylum grounds, detached or semi-detached, for convalescent and chronic cases, or as imfirmaries for the sick. After each addition of this kind Visitors congratulate themselves that they have amply provided for the wants of the county by this last expenditure,—they find, however, that before the walls are well dry the new space provided is fully occupied, and that in two or three years more the same process has to be re¬ peated; the Superintendent reports there are many claimants for admission, and the corridors or clay-rooms have to be turned into dormitories until a further addition is made. One of the latest asylums opened—the Cumberland and Westmoreland—already requires to be enlarged. At the Denbigh asylum wings are to be added for 150 patients. Lord Carnarvon’s Parliamentary Committee, last Session, on Prison Disipline, has established a long-known fact, that a certain class of paupers in workhouses prefer the gaol, and have been in the habit of qualifying themselves for a tempo¬ rary residence therein, when disposed to do so. It is also a fact that criminals in convict prisons occasionally feign insanity, and are the most unpopular cases in asylums. Pauper lunatics who have been sent as recovered to workhouses, often become dissatisfied with the change and become so troublesome that the authorities are obliged to send them back, thereby adding materially to the permanent residents in asylums. It would be much better and less costly to remove the sick poor altogether from under the harsh provisions of the Poor Law Board, than to be constantly adding to county asylums, destroying their character as hospitals for the treatment of in¬ sanity, and emptying the workhouses of the least desirable of their inmates. Under different management the workouses might be made really beneficial to the sick poor, and one-fourth the patients in the asylum might be transferred there. Admissions and Discharges. Omitting the firstyear, 1848, when the patients were removed from the licensed houses, the annual average number of admissions for the fifteen years, since 1849, has been 146; of these 13J per cent, have been relapsed cases. These details are distinctly shown in Table XI. in the appendix.