INSANITY, AND THE INSANE HOSPITAL AT WORCESTER.

One evening, as the Rev. Mr. Stewart was sitting at the door of his humble dwelling in the Sandwich Islands, he beheld a poor maniac, running along the beach, pursued by a crowd of merciless natives. They were pelting him with clubs and stones, and the blood, with which his body was crimsoned, showed how cruelly unerring was their aim. This was their customary treatment of the insane.

Such cruelty was inexcusable even in savages, and yet until very recently civilized and Christian nations have treated this unfortunate class of the community with bodily torture not less excruciating, and with a refinement of mental suffering even more to be dreaded. Many of the public and private madhouses of Europe, utter a tale as eloquent with horror, as can be heard from the gloomiest vaults or the deepest dungeons of the Tower or the Conciergerie. These receptacles of the insane, with their grated cells, and heavy manacles, and stern attendants, and unfeeling treatment, have been sufficiently terrible to drive to distraction the best regulated minds. Let a man be suddenly seized, and rudely torn from friends and home; let him be thrown into a company of maniacs, indiscriminately shut up together, raving, shouting, groaning, singing, crying—and let him remain for a few days in this wild scene of horrible grimace, ungovernable frolic, and frenzied revelry, and how long would reason retain her throne? Yet such have been the influences into which individuals with shattered nerves and highly excited minds have been cast, that they might be restored to the serene enjoyment of their faculties. A sensitive and delicate female, is, in consequence of some overwhelming calamity or afflictive bereavement, in a state of mind bordering on insanity and she is sent to the mad-house for cure. The excited state of her mind, renders her more sensitive to brutal treatment and vulgar associates, and she is speedily driven to entire and hopeless distraction. State prisons have very justly been called the seminaries of Satan. The youthful in guilt, have in the abandonment and in the midnight orgies of their infernal cells, been matriculated in the mysteries of crime. So it has been with too many of the asylums of the insane. They may have been without impropriety denominated the receptacles and manufactories of insanity.

It is difficult to account for the severity of treatment which the insane have received. For many centuries the sentiment seems to have been almost unquestioned that this class of invalids should be terrified and lashed and goaded to the serene enjoyment of their mental powers. Celsus says, that this unnatural excitement of the mind, must be allayed by starvation, chains and the lash. Willis an eminent English Physician, who wrote about two centuries since, recommends manacles, fetters and stripes, and insists upon coarse food, rough clothing, a hard bed, and treatment generally rigid and severe. It mattered not whether the patient was a hardy sailor, or the refined lady, who had been nurtured from the table of dainties, and had reposed on the couch of down.

Savages who generally suppose that insanity results from demoniacal possession, have a shadow of reason on their side, when they endeavor to whip the demon out of the body into which he has intruded. But it is indeed strange, that civilized nations, with more enlighted views, as to the nature of the disease, should so long have followed this cruel and unnatural prescription. Every measure seems to have been adopted which ingenuity could devise to torture and terrify the poor maniac into sanity. Among these instruments of torture the bath of surprise is one, which not unfrequently has proved fatal. The unsuspecting patient, perhaps in feeble health, and with a nervous system highly excited, is blindfolded and led across a room, when he is unexpectedly plunged into a bath of cold water, the sides of which are carefully guarded with cushions. The sudden shock and fright are so great, that in not a few instances the patient has never recovered from them. Sometimes the patient would be seated in a chair, and from a trap-door fourteen feet above his head, a large pail of water would suddenly be poured upon him. Enfeebled in body by damp dungeons, degraded by heavy chains, and exasperated by unkind treatment, it is not strange that so few should recover. A farmer in Scotland who kept a private mad-house, was in the habit of yoking a number of the insane in his plough,and goading them on to plough his fields. There are but few so far lost to selfrespect as not to feel, and keenly feel such degradation. Insanity does not always blunt the sensibilities, it not unfrequently excites them to the greater acuteness. A nobleman in England of fine and cultivated mind suddenly became insane and manifested so much violence that it was necessary to confine him with the strait waistcoat. The restraint and imagined insult exasperated him to the highest degree. Offended pride increased his delusions and ravings. One day his physician urged him

to walk in the garden for exercise. "No sir!" he replied, "I will not, while in this degraded condition!" (glancing at the strait waistcoat.) "But my Lord, no one will see you there." "Ah sir! What a base man you must be to think i. is the being seen! No sir, it is not my body's degradation it is my mind that is degraded and suffers." This man while most furiously insane felt the ignominy to which he was exposed by confinement and constraint.

There are perhaps no institutions in which oppression and abuse may be more easily practised than in asylums for the insane. Persons perfectly sane have not unfrequently been confined for long periods, and subjected to the most rigorous treatment, in consequence of the representations of others, who from motives of interest or revenge desired their seclusion. It has been by no means a difficult task to have a sane man shut up in the wards of a lunatic hospital. A man of slight eccentricities of character has a large fortune which relatives are anxious to secure. They place him in some private institution. The man is indignant at this treatment, and his indignation passes for raving. Perhaps he makes a great effort to control his feelings, and most earnestly denies being the subject of any mental derangement. His very denial is considered as evidence against him, and his moderation is regarded as the proverbial cunning with which the lunatic endeavors to effect his escape. A man of an undisturbed understanding, suddenly surprised by the servants of a lunatic asylum, with handcuffs ready, and a coach waiting to carry him off, would infallibly exhibit some signs easily construed into proofs that he was "not right in his head:" a man of shy and eccentric habits, if exposed to a similar outrage, would manifest his feelings in moods still more peculiar and furnish abundant proofs of undeniable madness; and if the attempt were made on an individual of a susceptible nervous system, of irritable temperament, suffering too, under some temporary cause of discomposure or affliction, no one who has ever attended to the inequalities of his own mind, can doubt that his mental government would be sufficiently shaken, to warrant any restraint or coercion on the part of those, who would seldom be found reluctant to restrain and coerce.

Once confined, the very confinement is admitted as the strongest of all proofs, that the man must be mad. When after suffering so much wrong, he has an opportunity of speaking to the appointed visitors of the house, supposing him to be confined where he can be visited, and supposing him not to give way to his feelings but to control them;-his entreaties, his anxious representations, his prayers for liberty, what do they

avail. The keeper of the asylum is accustomed to all these things. He knows that the truly and dangerously insane can act in the same way; and from ignorance, in the absence of any bad intention, he entirely disregards the patient's words. The visitors knowing nothing of the shades of disordered minds, or not reflecting upon them, are told that they see the "best of him ;" that it is one of his "good days;" that he is often dreadfully violent, or that if left to himself he will commit suicide: and they shrink from the responsibility of deciding, where they know it is very possible they may be wrong!

It is a much more difficult matter than is generally imagined for a person suspected of insanity to convince others that he is not insane. In a lunatic asylum you may talk for hours with individual patients, without eliciting a single remark, which detects their insanity. The most furious maniacs have hours and days of apparent freedom from any unnatural excitement. Many persons are insane upon one subject only. They will converse upon other topics with perfect propriety; their demeanor is consistent and respectful. No one would suspect their mental aberration, as long as the particular subject of derangement is not introduced. In the Hospital at Worcester, an individual was introduced, brought from some distant town, and no account of the peculiarity of his case came with him. For several weeks he gave no exhibition whatever of a disordered mind. His conduct was correct, his conversation calm and rational. One day he wished to smoke, and on being told that it was contrary to the laws of the institution, he was excited to a violent rage; his insanity at once flashed out; he declared that he was high sheriff, and possessed authority paramount to any and all other. Upon this point, and this only, the man was insane, and as nothing had previously occurred, during his residence in the Hospital, to contradict directly his will, his particular delusion had not been elicited. Pinel mentions the case of a lunatic, confined in one of the Hospitals in France, who appeared so perfectly sane that the Commissary, after holding a long conversation with him, and detecting no shade of hallucination, ordered him to be discharged. When the certificate was handed the patient, he subscribed himself, Jesus Christ, and immediately was lost in reverie and delusion. A physician was once prosecuted by an insane man for confining him without cause in a mad-house. The lunatic underwent the most rigid examination, and perfectly sustained his character for soundness of mind, until some one asked him about a princess with whom he had corresponded in cherry juice. This

touched the chord which awoke all his latent delusions, and he exhibited himself to the court a violent maniac.

Hence a man who is really sane, if once placed in a madhouse by the machinations of others, finds it almost impossible to prove his sanity. He can say nothing which the most furious madmen have not said. He can present no evidence of a sound mind, which has not again and again been presented by those whose delusions are the most frantic and dangerous. And if the mind has been enfeebled by disease, or agitated by calamities, or disturbed and dejected by the pressure of care, it is still more difficult to sustain mental composure, under the irritations of unjust confinement and persecution,

The caprices of the human mind are inexplicable and indefinable. Mental delusions are of all kinds and degrees, from the slight shades of eccentricity to the phrenzied laugh, and uncontrollable rage of the confirmed maniac. Take any definition of insanity which is laid down in treatises upon this subject, and it will either make one half the world suitable subjects for Bedlam, or it will be so narrow as to set at liberty one half of those who are now inmates of lunatic asylums. Locke says that insanity is reasoning correctly from wrong premises. And is every man who reasons from false premises mad? And does every madman reason correctly from the impressions with which he is deluded? The futility of every definition hitherto offered of the morbid conditions of the mind, is now very generally admitted. When Dr. Burrow, in an important legal investigation, was asked by the court to define unsoundness of mind, he decidedly declined, saying that he had heard the question frequently put to medical men of the greatest eminence, and never heard any one of them, by his explanation make the subject at all clearer.*

There is no end to the false impressions and delusions with which the mind may be affected. A physician was once called to see a man laboring under the fancy that he was converted into a tea-pot. And when the physician endeavored to ridicule him out of the idea, he indignantly replied, "I am a tea-pot," and forming a semi-circle with one arm by placing his hand upon his hip, he said "there is the bandle," and thrusting out the other arm, there is the spout." Men have believed themselves converted into barrels rolled along the street. One case is recorded of a man who believed himself a clock, and would stand for hours at the head of the stairs, clicking with his tongue. A respectable tradesman in England even fancied himself metamorphosed into a seven shilling piece, and took the precaution of requesting as a particular favor of his friends, that if his wife should present him in payment, they would not give change for him. Some have supposed that many armed knights were engaged in battle within them. A sea-captain in Philadelphia, believed for many years that he had a wolf in his liver. A mad-man in the Pennsylvania hospital believed that he was once a calf, and mentioned the name of the butcher who killed him, and the stall in Philadelphia market on which his flesh was sold, previously to his animating his present body. One man believes his legs to be made of butter and with the greatest caution avoids the fire; another imagines them to be made of glass, and 3

VOL. I.