On the Lunatic Asylums in the United States. 



73 



by many who have placed their diseased friends in the Institution, 

 to be a liberal allowance of time for deciding the question of re- 

 covery, in cases of 10 years duration. As if the chaos of illusions, 

 teeming for years in a distempered imagination, and revived with 

 innumerable repetitions, oy tne unexhausted workings of insanity, 

 might be swept at once from the tablets of the mind, by a profes- 

 sional receipt ; or the stormy passions of confirmed madness, al- 

 ready threatening the foundations of intellect, might be hushed 

 and subdued by the sovereign touch of some Esculapian trident ! 

 He who seeks for events, not in miracles nor in magic, but in the 

 operation of settled laws, will comprehend why years of persever- 

 ing effort must be required for the cure of long established cases 

 of insanity ; and although he ought never to be sanguine in his 

 hopes, yet, if his mind be endowed with a tact to perceive the sub- 

 tle individualities of a case, and detect them under the disguise of 

 a general character, he will find that such a case is marked as dis- 

 tinct and separate from its class, and completely exempted from 

 the general rules of treatment and prognosis. Should he have 

 learned to distinguish a derangement of mental functions from a 

 destruction of mental organs, where insanity in the one case is dis- 

 ease, in the other, death of intellect, then he may occasionally 

 have the unspeakable satisfaction to discover, here and there, a 

 case on the list, where the still " glimmering embers of a nearly 

 extinguished intellect" may be kindled and nursed into a clearer 

 and brighter flame, by the delicate and dexterous administration of 

 long continued and well adjusted moral and intellectual remedies." 



Through the kindness of Dr. Todd, I am enabled to present the 

 results of this institution for the five years during which it has 

 been in operation. A large portion of the following tables, and 

 particularly the details of the last year, have never been published. 



10 



