On the Scientific Study of Human Nature. 471 



that which records the treatment of the insane. Those 

 upon whom had fallen the heaviest calamity possible in 

 life, were looked upon with horror, as accursed of God, and 

 treated with a degree of cruelty which seems now incredible. 

 Asylums were dark and dismal jails, where their inmates 

 were left in cold, hunger, and filth, to be chained and 

 lashed at the caprice of savage keepers. And this bar- 

 barism continued in countries claiming to be enlightened 

 down to the middle of the present century. Let me men- 

 tion a solitary instance, of which the literature of the sub- 

 ject is full. 



Said Dr. Conolly, in a lecture in 1847 : "It was in the 

 Female Infirmary at Hanwell, exactly seven years ago, 

 that I found, among other examples of the forgetfulness 

 of what was due either to the sick or insane, a young 

 woman lying in a crib, bound to the middle of it by a strap 

 around the waist, to the sides of it by the hands, to the 

 foot of it by the ankles, and to the head of it by the neck ; 

 she also had her hands in the hard leathern terminations of 

 canvas sleeves. She could not turn, nor lie on her side, 

 nor lift her hand to her face, and her appearance was mis- 

 erable beyond the power of words to describe. That she 

 was almost always wet and dirty, it is scarcely necessary 

 to say. But the principal point I wish to illustrate by men- 

 tioning this case is, that it was a feeble and sick woman 

 who was thus treated. At that very time her whole skin 

 was covered with neglected scabies, and she was suffering 

 all the torture of a large and deep-seated abscess of the 

 breast." "Again," he remarks, "old and young, men and 

 women, the frantic and the melancholy, were treated worse 

 and more neglected than the beasts of the field. The cells 

 of an asylum resembled the dens of a squalid menagerie ; 

 the straw was raked out, and the food was thrown in through 

 the bars, and exhibitions of madness were witnessed which 

 are no longer to be found, because they were not the sim- 



