74 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Though legislative enactment has made all asylums hospitals 

 in name, it has not accomplished this in fact. To-day the tend- 

 ency of the State care act, though noble and generous in its in- 

 ception, has been to make the hospital treatment of the curable 

 insane almost impossible, or at least most difficult. It has crowded 

 all the State hospitals with a mass of patients for whom nothing 

 medically can be done, thus essentially interfering with proper 

 classification. It compels the placing of recent, curable, mania- 

 cal, and suicidal cases with old chronic patients who are violent, 

 destructive, and filled with all kinds of delusions of persecution 

 and various hallucinations. These tend not only to strengthen 

 the newcomers in their own morbid ideas, but to implant many 

 new ones. Their influence on the terrified, depressed, and deluded 

 is especially pernicious. It is not necessary to paint a word-pic- 

 ture of the sad effect of such surroundings on these sufferers. 

 Every asylum physician has been deeply touched by the descrip- 

 tions by recovered patients of the shock upon them on admission 

 of their surroundings; the shouts of their neighbors, the inde- 

 scribable fear of other patients, the frightful thought, " This will 

 be my fate," the baneful remarks of mischievous patients present 

 in every institution who, with show of sympathy, say to the hy- 

 persensitive newcomer, " Such a one has been detained here these 

 many years, and doubtless you will be." 



These are not argument-made examples, but exist in every 

 State hospital. They not only influence temporarily the imagina- 

 tion, but often do irremediable damage to the mind. The Penn- 

 sylvania State Lunacy Report, in considering this subject, says : 

 " The acute are often heard to allude with horror to the condition 

 of the chronic patients, dwelling most painfully upon the immi- 

 nent probability of soon becoming hopelessly lost to home, friends, 

 and society, and of passing the remainder of their lives in similar 

 seclusion. Like begets like, and as the population of any hospital 

 for the insane is chiefly chronic, there being relatively only a 

 limited number of acute cases scattered through the various 

 wards, this evil association must rob society of many a useful and 

 productive citizen by placing him in daily contact with those 

 who mar his chances for recovery." These are the mental and 

 moral effects of such intercourse. 



The chronic insane by the mere force of numbers also influence 

 too much the character of the management of a State hospital and 

 turn it from its true work, the cure of the insane. They consti- 

 tute more than nine tenths of the entire number of patients in 

 every mixed asylum, and receive more attention and care than the 

 character of their condition demands, thus depriving the curable 

 insane, who are less than one tenth the number, of much of what 

 the hopefulness and acuteness of their sickness needs and requires. 



