what makes him Godlike and divine-a blank and melancholy semblance of humanity, a disfigured and distorted image of our Allwise Progenitor. Hence in early times a madman was deemed stricken of God, or the Nemesis, and poor feeble minds were reverenced as having something in them superhuman and saintly. It would have been well if such ideas had taken deeper root, and then our task had been a brighter and more pleasing one; for, whatever enlightenment did for the poor and needy, it does not seem to have done much for the miserable lunatic. A marked and hideous thing, a forlorn, mocked, and despised being, he was left to ramble abroad uncared for, alike amid summer's heat and winter's cold, cut off for ever from all sympathy and social relations. Amongst the Hebrews even, with all their preshadowings of purer things, the man bereft of reason was little better treated. When David simulated madness at Gath, and 'scrabbled on the doors of the gate, and let his spittle fall down upon his beard,' Achish, the king, said, 'Have I need of madmen, that ye have brought this fellow to play the madman in my presence? Shall this fellow come into my house?' And we may regard the terrible visitation upon Nebuchadnezzar as that of insanity, with all its violent human and social estrangements. In Greece, the insane seem to have been rare, owing, probably, to the great attention ever paid to physical health and robustness. When in good circumstances, as later in Rome, they were retained under the supervision of their friends, but when poor they must have depended for subsistence upon the state, coming yearly for their pittance before the senate, with their olive branch wreathed with wool, along with the aged and otherwise infirm. In neither Greece nor Rome can we find any attempts to mitigate their condition or reclaim them; and the luxurious patron of Horace and Virgil, soothing his sleepless brain by the murmur of fountains and cascades, is our only evidence of any palliative means whatever. The only receptacle for the poorer sort of Roman lunatics was the common prison, in which the law enacted that they should be confined in chains; and only the compassion of the officer in charge came between the law and its unhesitating fulfilment. Even in more Christian times, amongst ourselves, the poor madman was deemed little better than a brute; and men shrugged their shoulders pharisaically as they passed him, quieting their consciences by imagining he had forfeited all claims upon their charity or fellow-feeling. If he chanced to be wealthy, his relatives took care of him, but were rather tetchy if their prerogative was interfered with or questioned. Horace Walpole writes so late as 1777: In April, my nephew, Lord Orford, went mad again, and was under my care; but as he had employed a lawyer of whom I had a bad opinion in his affairs, I refused to take care of them.' Ancient Treatment of Lunatics. 51 them.' Nominally, however, his nephew was still under his charge, for he adds, the next year: My Lord Orford recovering in March, I gave up the care of him.' For the poor there was hardly any other refuge than the gloomiest cells of a common prison. Here all curative treatment resolved itself into two courses. When violent, or goaded into being so by cruel gaolers, he was buffeted, whipped, and starved, that he might gently come back to reason. If he was mild and harmless, or had come to some degree of soberness, we learn from Aubrey, who is confirmed by allusions in Shakspeare, that when licensed to go out an armilla of tin, printed, of about three inches breadth,' was soldered upon the left arm, and he was sent forth to beg a miserable subsistence as best he might. In 'King Lear' we have a description of this class, who formed the centre of many a terrible ballad and weird village legend. 'The country gives me proof and precedent Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices, Sometimes with lunatic bans, sometimes with prayers, These unfortunates were even persecuted for their erratic fancies, as many an old crone had been by swimming and torture because she chanced to suffer from indigestion, and plucked her rue leaves or dug up her gentian root to relieve it. A poor madman in the reign of James I., who called himself the Holy Ghost, was burned at the stake because, forsooth, he knew no better. But at length there came a mighty upheaving in the religious and social life, bringing with it many important general reforms. It only partially affected the insane by providing them one place in the whole of our country for their resort and restoration. A citizen of London, Simon Fitz-Mary, had founded, in 1247, a convent called the House of Bethlehem, from its yearly payment of one mark to the bishop of that name; and in the course of a century from its foundation it had gradually assumed the character of a hospital. An inquisition taken in 1403 reports that there were in the house six lunatics and three other sick persons. In 1546 the hospital was presented to the City by Henry VIII., and was subsequently placed under the control of the governors of Bridewell, and entirely set apart for the insane. In 1664 there were forty-four inmates; and the building falling into a ruinous condition, the corporation set apart 17,000l. for a new one, on the model of the Tuileries in Paris. It was rebuilt again in 1815. But in 1751 Bethlem was relieved of its overplus of patients by the opening of St. Luke's, with accommodation for something like E 2 three three hundred patients. We can say nothing as to the kind treatseent of the inmates during these periods, for Bethlem Hospital mems to have inaugurated the almost hellish system of heavilylocked manacles, hobbles, muzzles, stocks, and other instruments of torture, that make our blood curdle as we read of them. A very few years after its appropriation for lunatics, a committee reported that it was too loathsome to be visited, and down even to 1814 a most cruel confinement and coercion prevailed. The patients were mostly chained to the walls, either by one arm or leg, so as just to be able to stand upright and sit down, and a miserable blanket covering the body was all that could keep them warm or render them human. The men are described as looking like so many wretched dogs in some huge filthy kennel. Squalor and misery reigned supreme and omnipotent, and the walls of the hospital enclosed quite a mimic Pandemonium. In fact, it was not until the fame of this hospital had extended itself that we find the expressive word 'Bedlam' introduced into our language. Shakspeare is the first who uses it, in the Second Part of Henry VI., where the king speaks of York's 'bedlam and ambitious humour; so little as yet had humanity done, with all the new impulses flowing from a renovated religion, to soften and commiserate the condition of her degraded and unfortunate outcasts. If the English and the Dutch claim to be first in establishing special retreats for the insane, to the French are due the first attempts to restore them by gentler and more humane efforts. St. Vincente de Paul, a poor parish priest at Clichy, who, assisted by a pious and benevolent lady, founded the order of missions, afterwards called the Lazarites, from the house of St. Lazarus, in Paris, where their chief strength lay, was unceasing in his endeavours to ameliorate the condition of the insane. He recommended their admittance into the hospitals in place of the common prisons, and by various exercises of benevolence began a better state of things. Ténon, a French physician, and La Rochefoucauld also helped in the great movement; the former by an essay upon their state and treatment, the latter by an able memoir based upon it brought before the Constituent Assembly. Pinel, the humane physician of the Bicêtre, contributed a real and tangible result in favour of lighter restraints and an entirely new system of treatment by his liberations during the Reign of Terror. Twelve of the most violent cases were released at starting as the first part of the experiment, and the effect was magical. Their bonds removed, and entire confidence established between the patients and the physician, nature herself struggled up to the light of reason like flowers towards the sun. The strangest case of all was the first one. The man was an English captain, a wild and terrible Efforts of Pinel in France. 53 terrible fellow, who had once felled a keeper, as an ox, with one swing of his manacled arm. He had been confined so long that neither his name nor his crime-if he were guilty of any-could be remembered. The physician approached him alone, and told him his errand, and that he would merely substitute a waistcoat for his fetters. The man seemed full of wonder and amazement. His chains were removed, and the door of his cell left open. And when at length, after several ineffectual attempts, his feeble limbs, cramped and fettered for forty long and terrible years, were able to sustain him, he tottered to the door, and like a spent and broken-winged bird, gushing forth a song, half joy half pain, at recovered liberty, he seemed to grow wild and ecstatic at the sight of the bright blue heavens. From that hour he was a sane man, and assisted in quietly managing the house for the two years prior to his final liberation. Many other cases-some fifty in number-where reason returned upon the removal of the inmates from their damp cells and fiendish tortures, fully justified the most sanguine hopes of Pinel. His philanthropic example was followed in various provincial prisons with the same striking success. The British nation, ever slow to be fully aroused, was still slumbering on, imagining herself to be the perfect embodiment of charity and loving-kindness because she tortured the crazy to prevent them injuring other people, and now and then bestirred herself to erect a few asylums in different parts of the country. Had she not her Bethlem and St. Luke's, her private houses here and there for the better class of patients? were not her taxes devoted to keep these men and their keepers, to pay for iron collars, fetters, and gags innumerable? why should she be moved by a multitude of crack-brained Bedlam Toms? And so the nation nodded in self-complaisant after-dinner philanthropy, with one hand on her money-bags and the other on her digestive centre, until private individuals by their schemes and acts brought shame and reproach upon the dreaminess of patriotic parliaments. As a solitary wakeful exception, we know of no stranger one than that of the irascible and moody Dean Swift, at heart somewhat miserly, and flaring upon us from his writings like a portentous meteor, bequeathing, ere he himself became imbecile and blank, half his large fortune to erect and endow a hospital for lunatics. The two more prominent manifestations of private enterprise both began in the fine old city of York, the conglomerate representation of so many distinct civilizations. In the first movement of 1772, its ostensible object was the erection of a public edifice for those deplorable lunatics 'who had no other support than a needy parent could bestow, or a thrifty parish officer provide.' Archbishop Drummond headed the scheme; inquiries brought to light a considerable number of this class in the three ridings, and the result was the York Asylum, constructed to hold fifty patients, with one matron, one head keeper, and three servants of each sex. The number of attendants was amusingly small, but had not been enlarged when some years later the asylum contained two hundred inmates. Things ran on well for a time; but with the introduction of a better class of patients to make it pay, came feeing of physicians, neglect of the poorer sort, irregular, or rather no visitation at all, and the most flagrant internal abuse and disorder. The second organized movement was destined to revolutionize the whole system of asylum provisions and treatment. Springing from an apparently trivial incident, it serves to add another to the many curious instances of great things arising out of merest trifles; the digestion of a king affecting the destiny of an empire, and the overturning of a coach developing into new relations some ordinary human life. The falling of an apple produces the theory of gravitation, the marvellous memories of ox-eyed youths begets phrenology, and the refusal of acquaintances to visit a female of the Society of Friends, confined in a private house near York, and her subsequent death, were sufficient to create from pre-existing sympathies the salutary plan of dealing with the insane as human beings and human brethren. This event took place in 1791. The soul and impetus of this change seems to have had no great notions of any national good or honour to himself accruing from it; like many another brave man, he merely saw it to be necessary as far as it regarded his particular section of the community, and quietly and orderly set to work. There had been many conversations, many thees' and 'thous' on the subject, until a definite suggestion was made to William Tuke, who, ably assisted by Lindley Murray, shaped his ideas into form, and brought them before a Quarterly Meeting at York in March 1792. There was something very natural in these grave and kindly men, who had made their lives and dress so noble a protestation of principle and spirit, combining with such unostentatious benevolence to frame an indirect protest, and an actual remedy for so unchristian a state of things. It would be well if we could always remember such instances of heroic generosity in place of the drab coats and broadbrimmed hats by which, until lately, the elements of Quakerism were supposed to be defined and manifest. Preliminaries arranged, and something like a thousand pounds in hand, land was purchased, a design was selected, and May 1796 saw the Retreat finished, opened, and succeeding so admirably, that two additional wings were soon required. A more rational treatment of the insane was commenced under Dr. Fowler, and continued by his successors, Drs. Capp and Belcombe, displaying so much sound commonsense that we are inclined to find amusement |