Twenty-second annual report of the trustees of the State Lunatic Hospital, at Worcester. December, 1854.

  • State Lunatic Hospital at Worcester.
Date:
1855
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Twenty-second annual report of the trustees of the State Lunatic Hospital, at Worcester. December, 1854. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    would seem that advantage might be taken of their general peculiarities, so that they would be induced to join in some industrial occupation. Many, if not most, of our patients are regaled daily at table with what would have been rare, and perhaps unknown luxu¬ ries in their former homes. These cannot be needful for their cure ; and the enjoyment of them might perhaps be made con¬ ditional upon their doing a certain amount of work. Few lose the sensitiveness of the “ pocket nerveand this, if not already morbidly active, might be quickened by prospect of immediate gain. It certainly would be better for the Hospital and for the State, to have all the inmates who are in ordinary bodily health busily engaged in light work, even by paying for every hour’s time, than to have hundreds lounging idly about the wards, gradually losing the tone and vigor of their bodies, and indifferent to every thing except the quantity and quality of the next meal. Of course the disinclination to steady occupation is seldom to be regarded as laziness, or as in any way culpable, but rather as one of the results of insanity, which deranges the distribution of the nervous energy, and sometimes lessens the amount of it. But though punishment, even by deprivation of comfort, may not be just, yet inducements to regular employment, in shape of wages or of little luxuries, may be both just and proper, by encouraging regular exercise of body and voluntary direction of the mental faculties, which become habitual, and therefore pleasant and salutary. It cannot be too often repeated that Nature, pitched out even by so rude a fork as insanity, constantly tends to return • and her plain indications may be often relied upon by the uninitiated, though they contravene doctrines announced as axi¬ omatic by the “ professors.” All agree that it is not right to thwart directly the inclinations of the insane, or to force them to action when disposed to inaction; but still the prin¬ ciple holds, that efforts at self-control are exercises which tend to strengthen the enfeebled mind, and that patients should be encouraged to make them. It is true that, generally, we have rather to deal with deranged than with diminished mental energy, in cases of recent insanity. There is undue, involuntary, perhaps violent action of cer-