Such conduct appears to have been general in those times.[[729]] At Geneva[[730]] some lunatics would be given grass and horrible things to eat to amuse visitors. This also happened at the Bicêtre,[[731]] in certain parts of Germany, etc.[[732]] “Les Fous de Charenton” became, for a time, notorious for their plays,[[733]] which were presented with much sound and fury, attracting spectators from very grotesqueness. They were forbidden in 1811.
High walls kept things dark for years, but the light stole through in the end, as it always will.[[734]] In 1793 Pinel removed the chains from patients in the Bicêtre. At home, the York Asylum, already alluded to, began to bear an evil reputation. In 1788 it incurred the Animadversions[[735]] of the Rev. William Mason.[[736]] In the year 1791 some friends of a female patient desired to visit her, but were not allowed, upon the plea that she was not in a suitable condition to be seen by strangers (she probably was not!) A few weeks after this she was reported dead.[[737]] The woman belonged to the Society of Friends, and the suspicious circumstances of her incarceration caused much resentment among the Quakers. Soon after, William Tuke resolved that they should have a hospital of their own. The Retreat was started in the year 1792, and its humane and enlightened methods were soon contrasted with the barbarous and secret administration prevailing at the older institution. But the years rolled by while patients languished and died. It was in 1813 that Samuel Tuke—a grandson of the founder of the Retreat—brought out a little work[[738]] describing the system there. It “excited universal interest, and, in fact, achieved what all the talents and public spirit of Mason and his friends had failed to accomplish. It had still better effects. A very inoffensive passage in this book roused, it seems, the animosity of the physician to York Lunatic Asylum, and a letter which this gentleman published in one of the York newspapers[[739]] became the origin of a controversy among the governors of that establishment, which terminated in August 1814, after a struggle of nearly two years, in the complete overthrow of the old system, and the dismission of every officer of the asylum, except the physician himself.”[[740]]
The conflict was taken up by others and carried on. Towards the close of that same year (1813), a case of alleged misconduct was brought forward by Mr. Godfrey Higgins, a magistrate for the West Riding. “Mr. Higgins’ statement was read” (before twenty-seven governors), “after which the accused servants of the house were called in and sworn. They denied upon oath the truth of the charges. No other evidence was called for; nor was any minute committed to writing of what had been sworn by the servants. The following resolution was passed:—The governors having taken into consideration the statements published in the York and other newspapers respecting the treatment of William Vicars, lately a patient in this asylum, ... are unanimously of opinion that ... he was treated with all possible care, attention, and humanity.”[[741]] It was of no avail; thirteen gentlemen of the county came forward with donations, in virtue of which they qualified as governors. These new men brought their votes to bear to force on an inquiry, and though the old gang of scoundrels never got their deserts, and, to conceal their guilt, are said to have set the premises on fire, yet they were driven out of their situations, and soon investigation became national.
In 1814 Mr. George Rose brought in a Bill to regulate asylums, which passed the House of Commons. But the authorities at Bedlam opposed the measure,[[742]] spending over £600 in so doing. They had good cause, as we shall see presently. The York Asylum governors—nineteen of them, including the archbishop—sent in a petition against it; and the intrepid Mr. Higgins sent one in its favour, signed by himself.[[743]] The Bill was thrown out by the House of Lords,[[744]] but a committee of the House of Commons was then appointed, and collected the inconceivable and horrible evidence from which we have quoted. Its report was presented by Mr. Rose in 1815,[[745]] and though the committee at Bedlam formally exonerated its officials for all things they had done and neglected to do, including even the dreadful instrument placed round Norris,[[746]] the unofficial mind of the public had been roused to indignation, and many of the worst abuses were presently remedied.
Mr. Rose died in 1818, but in the following year Mr. Wynn brought forward another Bill, which was, however, opposed by Lord Eldon, who observed[[747]] that “there could not be a more false humanity than over-humanity with regard to persons afflicted with insanity,” a line of argument which we shall come on again. That Bill shared the fate of its predecessor. It was not until nine years afterwards that Mr. Gordon secured the passing of an Act[[748]] to improve the asylums, in the year 1828. Though abuses continued into the middle of the nineteenth century,[[749]] and many Acts of Parliament were subsequently brought in,[[750]] the monstrous evils of which we have spoken continued as crimes where previously they had been customs, and took place on a much diminished scale.
At Lincoln Asylum,[[751]] about 1838, Dr. Gardner Hill removed mechanical restraints, and Dr. Conolly[[752]] followed at Hanwell in the succeeding year. In this they were, of course, opposed in the Profession,[[753]] but new ideas and new conceptions were coming, which are still working in the treatment of insanity. All along, heretofore, the Mind and the Body had been conceived as two separate things. People had ceased to believe in the interference of devils, but they spoke vaguely of “a mind diseased.” There being often no physical injury that could be detected, “the common opinion seemed to be confirmed that it” (mental disorder) “was an incomprehensible, and consequently an incurable, malady of the mind.”[[754]]
A medical writer[[755]] of the early nineteenth century could allude to lectures he had attended, at which the doctor had declared that treatment and physic were useless in a case of furor uterinus, because it was a disease of the mind, not of the body. No doubt there loomed the fear of Free Will and Theology. “... Many very able men,” says Dr. Halliday,[[756]] “led away by what appeared to be the general opinion of mankind, shrank from a strict investigation of a subject that seemed to lead to a doubt of the immateriality of mind, a truth so evident to their own feelings and so expressly established by divine revelation.” It is not for us to turn aside into labyrinths, or to attempt to settle what “mind” may mean. But we know that, to our present power of comprehension, the mind can only function through the body. How it first formed, and if it can yet rekindle, are vital questions which may never be answered; at any rate they lie beyond our range.
Gradually metaphysics and moral concepts were left behind as experts examined facts. “... Derangement,” says a nineteenth-century writer,[[757]] “is no longer considered a disease of the understanding, but of the centre of the nervous system, upon the unimpaired condition of which the exercise of the understanding depends. The brain is at fault and not the mind.”
“The old notion,” says Dr. Wynter,[[758]] “that derangement of mind may happen without any lesion of the instrument of thought being the cause or consequence, has long been exploded.”
The physical origin of insanity “became gradually accepted. Its mental phenomena were more carefully observed, and its relation was established to other mental conditions which had not hitherto been regarded as insane in the proper sense of the word.... Hitherto the criteria of insanity had been very rude, and the evidence was generally of a loose and popular character; but whenever it was fully recognised that insanity was a disease with which physicians who had studied the subject were peculiarly conversant, expert evidence obtained increased importance, and from that time became prominent in every case. The new medical views of insanity were thus brought into contact with the old narrow conceptions of the law courts, and a controversy arose in the field of criminal law, which, in England at least, is not yet settled.”[[759]]