HEALTH AND DISEASE 343 



tions improperly. Any one who has had experience in the administration 

 of mental hospitals knows that this is a most untrue accusation, yet laws 

 still exist which make it difficult for patients to enter mental hospitals, al- 

 though admission to any other kind of hospital is very simple. When ad- 

 mission is made difficult, and particularly when a jury trial (which often 

 appears to the patient and to the public both to be in the nature of criminal 

 proceedings) is necessary, admission to a mental hospital is delayed and 

 often the best chance of cure of the patient is lost. The existence of the 

 popular notion of "railroading" has done much to delay the early admis- 

 sion of patients and thereby to deprive the mental hospitals of one of their 

 proper functions. Again it should be pointed out that in some localities it is 

 permitted to use the jail for temporary care of mental patients until such 

 time, sometim.es several weeks or months, as the mental hospital finds room 

 for the patient. Such proceeding is, of course, seriously out of line with 

 sound practice and is grossly unfair to the mentally afflicted patient. 



Some of the feeling that mental disorder is something apart from general 

 medicine, that it is something which labors under a stigma, is perhaps due 

 to the way in which psychiatry has been presented and in which in the past 

 mental hospitals have been operated. There was a time when the asylum 

 with its forbidding wall made no effort to overcome in the community the 

 attitude of suspicion which was directed toward it by those ignorant of 

 its activities. The "asylum doctors" were looked down upon by the physi- 

 cians in the locality and an atmosphere of hocus-pocus and of something 

 mysterious tended to keep people away from the institution, both physi- 

 cally and mentally. In medical schools the student was given the impression 

 that mental disorder was something not akin in any way to the rest of 

 medicine; the lectures were the most sketchy and sometimes not even ac- 

 companied by a visit to the mental hospital, with the result that physicians 

 have in the past not been in a position to assist in breaking down the public 

 distrust. To-day we find psychiatry integrated with the rest of medicine 

 in medical training. We find medical students spending much of their time 

 in mental hospitals, working at close quarters with the patients and coming 

 to realize that psychiatry is something which touches every other field of 

 medicine. They realize, too, from what they see in the institutions that 

 they are not the places of horror and misery which some even to-day seem 

 to consider them. Further, many general hospitals are establishing psychia- 

 tric wards — a decidedly salutary step in bringing psychiatry and general 

 medicine into closer union. 



Another misconception has been that once a patient was admitted to a 

 mental hospital all hope was lost, and there are many who think that the 

 inscription described by Dante over the gates of the Inferno is written, even 

 though invisibly, over the entrance of mental hospitals. Such is, of course, 

 far from the case. Mental disorder does not warrant the attitude of hope- 

 lessness which the public ascribes to it, even though certain types of mental 



