Treating Maniacs with Water 



How the modem physician soothes raving luna- 

 tics with nothing but hot and cold water 



Bv John E. Lind, M.D. 



Senior Assistant Physician, Gov't. Hospital for 

 Insane, Washington, D. C. 



THE expression "raving maniac" is met 

 with constantly in the press and in 

 our daily speech, but it is doubtful 

 if many people know just what it means. 

 Probably the most common picture con- 

 jured up by the term is a vision of a wild- 

 eyed lunatic dashing madly through a 

 terrified crowd, shooting and stabbing, 

 until he is overpowered by the police and 

 borne aw^ay to a padded cell where his 

 shrieks are heard but faintly through the 

 walls. While a maniac may run amuck in 

 the streets before he is apprehended, this 

 is not so common nowadays. Our knowl- 

 edge of the real nature of insanity is becom- 

 ing more exact, and we are able to detect 

 its presence sooner as well as to treat it 

 more intelligently and humanely. 



A little over a centur>- ago the person 

 who was mentally ill was regarded as 

 something between a wild beast and a 

 criminal. He was chained hand and foot 

 to a stone wall in a dark, ill- ventilated cell ; 

 his food was doled out to him at the end of 

 a long stick; he was exhibited in iron cages 

 to passersby, who, by paying a few pennies, 

 were at liberty to ridicule him or "stir him 

 up" in any way they chose. When his 

 keepers thought it advisable he was beaten, 

 ducked under the water or otherwise ill- 

 treated with the idea that the evil spirit, 

 which was supposed to have taken posses- 

 sion of him, could thus be driven out. 

 Towards the end of the i8th century, 

 Pinel, a French doctor, made the experi- 

 ment of striking the chains from the in- 

 mates of Saltpetrie, a famous old asylum 

 at Paris. His example was soon followed 

 throughout the civilized world. Even after 

 this great step forward, however, many 

 strange and, as we now see, cruel methods 

 of treating the mentally ill were practised, 

 ruch as strapping them in rotary swings 

 which revolved a hundred times a minute, 

 bleeding them freely, etc. 



In all the history of the treatment of 

 mental disorder it is the maniac who has 

 given the most trouble, and naturally so. 

 He is quiet neither night nor day. Pacing 



The continuous bath for raving maniacs. 

 In this the patient lives, eats and sleeps 



restlessly back and forth, tearing his clothes 

 to pieces, singing and shouting, refusing 

 to eat or sleep, he has always been a menace 

 to life and propert>^ In thousands of 

 cases he has so worn himself out that, his 

 vitality reduced to a low level, he has 

 been the prey of some disease. 



What the Strait- Jacket Means 



There have been three main ways of 

 treating maniacs, all of which have had 

 for their basic idea the object of restraining 

 them. The first of these ways was by 

 actual restraint; that is, the excited person, 

 was put in a strait- jacket or bound hand 

 and foot. What torture this was to the 

 poor sufferer will never be known, except 

 by those who have endured it. Some of the 

 readers of the Popular Science Monthly 

 have had what are termed the "fidgets," 

 when it seems impossible to be quiet for 

 more than a second. If you can imagine 

 having the fidgets a hundred times as badly 

 as you have ever had them and if you 

 can imagine being strapped in a canvas 

 jacket with your arms bound tightly to 

 your s'des so that you cannot move them 

 and being kept in this way for days at a 

 time you will have a faint idea of what the 

 maniac suffered during the years when this 

 was the only method of handling such cases. 



Following these mechanical devices for 

 restraining them, patients were given power- 



