1870.] On Insanity. 171 



physician." Green County — " Six lunatics are confined in cells, 

 live of them are in chains, including two women. Some are chained 

 to the wall. They are in a wretched state, and none are cured or 

 improved. In conclusion, the following quotation of Dr. Eobertson 

 from Dr. Willard's report may show the opinion of the Executive 

 of the United States, that is to say if opinions infer conduct, upon 

 the status of the insane : — " In some of these buildings the insane 

 are kept in cages, in cells dark and prison-like, as if they were 

 convicts instead of the life-weary, deprived of reason. They are 

 in numerous instances left to sleep on straw like animals, without 

 other bedding ; and there are scores who endure the piercing cold 

 and frost of winter without either shoes or stockings being pro- 

 vided for them. They are pauper lunatics, and shut out from the 

 charity of the world, where they could at least beg shoes. Insane 

 in a narrow cell, perhaps without clothing ; sleeping on straw or 

 in a bunk, receiving air, light, and warmth only through a diamond 

 hole through a rough, prison-like door ; bereft of sympathy and of 

 social life, except it be with a fellow-lunatic ; without a cheering 

 influence or a bright hope of the future : can any picture be more 

 dismal ? and yet it is not overdrawn." 



In Kome the picture may almost be drawn over again, and in 

 fact wherever the influence of the intellectual classes is swamped by 

 the masses or by an uneducated legislature. We, as a nation, have 

 issued from this reproach hardly fifty years. It is still usual to 

 connect lunacy with an indefinite something which implicates 

 Providence and the dependence of the mind upon cerebral action, 

 due reservation being made that there is nothing material between 

 them. The present system of the treatment of the insane is 

 founded upon these remarkably indefinite ideas, but it is a satis- 

 faction to find that even the Commissioners in Lunacy, who origi- 

 nate with the Keeper of the Queen's conscience, have at last had the 

 courage to associate mental perversion with physical decay. Let us 

 notice how some old facts carry out their opinion. 



It is excessively difficult to come to a satisfactory conclusion 

 respecting the amount of insanity and its kind in uncivilized races, 

 and also in those nations where civilization differs materially from 

 our own. The most savage races do not come sufficiently in con- 

 tact with accurate observers for a correct estimate of their freedom 

 from mental disease to be formed, and the low type of their reason- 

 ing powers may oftentimes not render delusion and mild dementia 

 prominent mental conditions. It is rare that any unusual strain is 

 placed upon the minds of such savages ; but when it occurs insanity 

 appears not to be uncommon. Thus, some of Livingstone's faithful 

 followers, who traversed the continent of Africa from west to east 

 with him, were evidently rendered insane and suicidally so by the 

 excitement consequent upon visiting residences of Europeans and 



