Under Elizabeth and the Stuarts, and even later, there were cases fully recognized by the English common law which differed from torture only in name. To quote the Encyclopedia Britannica again:
"The peine forte et dure was a notable example of this. If a prisoner stood mute of malice instead of pleading, he was [{190}] condemned to the peine, that is, to be stretched upon his back and to have iron laid upon him as much as he could bear, and more, and so to continue, fed upon bad bread and stagnant water through alternate days until he pleaded or died. It was abolished by George III, and George IV enacted that a plea of 'not guilty' should be entered for a prisoner so standing mute. A case of peine occurred as lately as 1726. At times tying the thumbs with whipcords was used instead of the peine. This was said to be a common practice at the Old Bailey up to the last century. In trials for witchcraft the legal proceedings often partook of the nature of the torture, as in the throwing of the reputed witch into a pond to see whether she would sink or swim, in drawing her blood, and in thrusting pins into the body to try to find the insensible spot. Confessions, too, appear to have been often extorted by actual torture, and torture of an unusual nature, as the devil was supposed to protect his votaries from the effects of ordinary torture."
The seventeenth century particularly witnessed the deaths of many thousands of poor people who were thought to be witches. Persecutions for witchcraft took place more particularly in the countries most affected by the Reformation. Germany as well as England had many of them. Even the crudest forms of torture were invented with almost devilish ingenuity at this time. It was under the influence of this delusional psychic contagion and the dread of possession by the devil that the insane and sufferers from nervous diseases of all kinds came to be treated more inhumanly than ever before. A climax of inhumanity in their regard was reached in the eighteenth century, when manacles and chains and dungeons were employed, until at last the exaggeration of ill-treatment brought with it reaction and reform.
Humanitarianism shows a decline, marked and definite and progressive from the end of the sixteenth until the end of the eighteenth century. Interest in religion sank as in England until John Wesley came to put a new spirit into it. The rights of men were less and less respected and the poor were oppressed by those above them until the awful conditions that developed in the ancien régime came in France, and [{191}] nearly similar conditions in other countries. The French Revolution had to come. Men could stand no more. As Hilaire Belloc, one of the best of the modern historians of the French Revolution, says, "That movement was really an attempt to restore to men the rights which they had enjoyed during the Middle Ages."
CHAPTER II
HOSPITALS, NURSING AND CARE FOR THE INSANE
An excellent criterion of the social status of any period in history is the genuine humanitarian purpose that animates it, and how seriously it takes the duty of caring for those who most need care is to be found in the character of its hospital buildings and their maintenance. Tried by this standard, Columbus' Century proves to be one of the greatest of the centuries of history. This will seem very surprising to most people, because the general impression has been that until our generation hospitals were rather ugly buildings of institutional type, with small windows, sordid surroundings and very unsuitable internal arrangements for the ailing. There is no doubt at all that hospital buildings just before our generation--and some of them unfortunately remain over as living witnesses--were all that has been thus suggested and if possible worse. Indeed, some of the hospital buildings of two generations ago were about as unsuitable for their purpose as could well be imagined. The general feeling with regard to this fact, however, is not so much one of blame as of pity. Most people assume that the older generations did not know how to build good hospitals. They did as well as they could, but until the development of modern knowledge of hygiene and sanitation, as well as the demand made on hospital administration by modern surgery, hospitals could scarcely be expected to be anything but the sordid piles of buildings they usually were, thought proper if they but furnished a protection from the weather and sustenance for the sick poor.
Anyone who will consult the real history of hospitals, however, will be surprised to find that the worst hospitals in the world's history were built in the first half of the nineteenth century. The usual impression is that, if the hospitals of a [{193}] century ago were so bad, those of the century preceding that must have been much worse and so on progressively more unsuitable until in the Middle Ages they must have been unspeakable. As a matter of fact, the hospitals of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were beautiful buildings as a rule, quite as charming structures for their purposes as all the other architecture of that time--churches, monasteries, abbeys, castles, town halls and the rest. They had at this time a period of wonderful surgical practice, of which we have learned from the republication of their text-books of surgery only in recent years, and there is a definite, direct ratio between surgery and proper hospital organization. Whenever there is good surgery there are good hospitals, and whenever there are good hospitals, surgery will be found occupying a prominent, progressive place in the history of medicine.
It is hard to understand the periods of decadence in hospital construction and maintenance and in nursing care and training, but not more difficult than to understand the ups and downs of surgery. That anaesthesia and antiseptic practice should obtain for a while and then gradually be lost is no harder to understand than that hospitals should gradually "sink to an almost indescribable level of degradation." Miss Nutting and Miss Dock, in their "History of Nursing," have described the century from 1750 to 1850 as "The Dark Period of Nursing."
They quote Jacobsohn, the well-known German writer about care for the ailing, who says "that it is a remarkable fact that attention to the well-being of the sick, improvements in hospitals and institutions generally and to details of nursing care, had a period of complete and lasting stagnation after the middle of the seventeenth century, or from the close of the Thirty Years' War. Neither officials nor physicians took any interest in the elevation of the nursing or in improving the conditions of hospitals. During the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century he proceeds to say nothing was done to bring either construction or nursing to a better state. Solely among the religious orders did nursing remain an interest and some remnants of technique survive. The result was that in this period the general level of nursing fell far below that of earlier [{194}] periods. The hospitals of cities were like prisons, with bare, undecorated walls and little dark rooms, small windows where no sun could enter, and dismal wards where fifty or one hundred patients were crowded together, deprived of all comforts and even of necessities. In the municipal and state institutions of this period, the beautiful gardens, roomy halls and springs of water of the old cloister hospital of the Middle Ages were not heard of, still less the comforts of their friendly interiors."