Penal Methods of the Middle Ages by George Burnham Ives

Author:George Burnham Ives [Ives, George Burnham]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Classics, Reference, General
Google: 6RrDDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Good Press
Published: 2019-11-25T02:43:28+00:00

CHAPTER III

TREATMENT OF THE INSANE

As the abnormal and the rationally eccentric were considered witches, and held to have been disciples of the devil, so the more obviously sense-bereft were thought to be controlled by the fiends within them. Both witches and lunatics were held to be beneath the sway of infernal powers, but the former as willing agents of the devil, and the latter as involuntary victims, who were deemed to be possessed. In ancient Egypt, by the Temple of Saturn,[612] in classic Greece with the Asclepieia, and by the laws of Pagan Rome,[613] the mentally afflicted were treated with humanity, and, if without the aid of our present science, at least upon the same broad principles which we adopt to-day.

In the warm sunlight of the Eastern lands the life of the population was spent in the open air. As we read in the Scriptures and in books of travel, the lunatic might dwell amidst the tombs. He could wander through the soothing cypress groves in the moonlight or lie under shading palm in the noontide heat. He dwelt apart, like the leper, cut off by his terrible infirmity from the kinship of reason, but free at least in the air and sunlight, and often allowed a quite especial licence[614] as being in the guardianship of God.[615] But the troublesome conduct into which lunatics were ever liable to be led[616] would frequently rouse the instinct of retaliation, and bring down swift and heavy punishment upon them.[617]

In Europe also and in England the less-dangerous lunatics “were allowed to wander about the country,[618] beggars and vagabonds, affording sport[619] and mockery.” We get a vivid glimpse from Shakespeare of that “poor Tom[620] that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall newt and the water newt, that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow-dung for sallets, swallows the old rat and the ditch dog, drinks the green mantle of the slimy pool;[621] who is whipt from tything to tything, and stocked, punished, and imprisoned.”[622]

This was the lot of sufferers in those times, and beyond doubt a certain number of them, unmindful or unheedful of savage laws, obeyed the obsessing suicidal impulse which is so common among mad people; and through this many of the most afflicted must have been taken, in the mercy of nature, out of the world of men in which they had no part. But if the half-witted poor were allowed to wander,[623] those of the richer class were less fortunate. Their families were shy and ashamed of them; they were concealed and locked in garrets and cellars, or penned apart, secured in sheds and outhouses—fastened up anywhere about the premises.[624]

Medicines there were indeed for the insane patients, and some of them might have added to the witches’ cauldron.[625] Among the less nauseous of these came wolf’s and lion’s flesh,[626] and as our Saxon forefathers were skilled herbalists, we find the clovewort, polion, and peony recommended,[627] also the mandrake, round which many stories were woven from its resemblance to the human form.

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