Authorizes the Commissioners in urgent cases to employ any competent person to visit any lunatic and to report to them.
Directs committee of every hospital to submit regulations to the Secretary of State for approval, and to send a copy to Commissioners.
Empowers Commissioners, with sanction of the Secretary of State, to make regulations for the government of licensed houses.
Enacts that Bethlem Hospital shall be subject to the provisions of Act 8 and 9 Vict., c. 100.
The third Act (16 and 17 Vict., c. 97) repeals the several Acts then in force respecting county and borough lunatic asylums, and re-enacts most of the provisions therein contained, with certain additions and improvements.
It authorizes justices of boroughs, instead of providing asylums for their own use, or in arranging with counties, etc., to contract with the Visitors of any asylum for the reception of their pauper lunatics, in consideration of certain payments.
The powers of the Visitors were enlarged in many ways.
When a county or borough asylum can accommodate more than its own pauper lunatics, the Visitors are empowered to permit the admission of the pauper lunatics of any other county or borough, or lunatics who are not paupers, but proper objects to be admitted into a public asylum, such non-pauper patients to have the same accommodation, in all respects, as the pauper lunatics.
The Visitors are directed to appoint a medical officer to be superintendent of the asylum.