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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    required improved buildings, grounds, and material appliances of various kinds. The improvements in the art of manufacturing cotton cloth have been so great within a quarter of a century, that a factory which possessed only the machinery provided for it twenty-five years ago, could not be run successfully in competition with new ones. No ability or resource of its directors, no skill or zeal of its agent, no fidelity or industry of its workmen, could ena¬ ble it to do as much or as good work as its more modern com¬ petitors. Now, a hospital for the insane is an establish¬ ment for repairing health of body, and, through this, health of mind. It is a place for repairing disordered men. It should possess the best machinery, and the best of officers to work it. The principal part of the machinery is the building, and its importance is immense. It should not merely serve to house the patients and protect them from the weather; but it should afford the greatest possible facility for applying the best mode of treatment, by its situation, its construction, its conveniences, its furniture, and its various means of occupation and amusement within ; and by its gardens, its grounds, and its contrivances and allurements to exercise and labor without. Lacking these advantages, no ability or resources of its trustees; no skill or zeal of its superintendent; no fidelity or industry of its attend¬ ants, can ever enable it do so much or so perfect works of cure as other institutions that possess them. But when, besides the lack of these advantages, a hospital is overcrowded with patients; when it is obliged to huddle together over five hundred and fifty persons in apartments constructed for only three hundred and twenty-seven, and con¬ structed, too, when less space was thought to be requisite than is now found to be essential; when, moreover, the patients, instead of being partly drawn according to the original purpose from an intelligent and educated yeomanry, are drawn mainly from a class which has no refinement, no culture, and not much civilization even—that hospital must certainly degenerate. Its degeneracy will be the more certain and the more striking if a short-sighted economy tempts its managers to adopt the readiest, instead of the wisest, methods of treatment, and to choose the cheapest, instead of the best system of adminis¬ tration.