Tracing Your Ancestors in Lunatic Asylums by Michelle Higgs

Author:Michelle Higgs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REFERENCE/Genealogy&Heraldry
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books
Published: 2020-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

Doctor John Conolly. Photograph by Maull & Polyblank. (Wellcome Collection. CC BY)

In his article on seclusion, Leslie Topp quotes John Conolly’s view that the great advantage of a padded room was to render ‘both mechanical restraints and muscular force unnecessary for the control of even the most violent patients’. At Hanwell, padded rooms were prepared ‘by a thick soft padding of coir … enclosed in ticken, fastened to wooden frames, and affixed to the four walls of the room’. The window was guarded by a close wire-blind ‘which admits light and air, but prevents access on the part of the patient to the glass or window frames’.

The Aberdeen Royal Lunatic Asylum operated a policy of minimal restraint, but in 1841 the medical officers pointed out that there were cases in which ‘mild restraint is both judicious and humane’, citing ‘furious nymphomania’ or the ‘unbridled violence of an outrageous maniac’. The medical officers stated, ‘We have no more hesitation in such cases, when other means have been useless, in applying the waist-belt, or the muff, than we would have in applying leeches or a blister against the will of the individual …’

Every instance of restraint had to be recorded in a Register of Restraint and Seclusion. At the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, restraint by seclusion or the confinement of patients to their own bedrooms was restricted to ‘when they are under such excitement as leads to Quarrelling, Fighting, Breaking Windows, and to Indecent Conduct’. In 1848, sixteen male patients were secluded and five were restrained by mechanical means using a sleeve dress to prevent dressings being removed, bursting open the bedroom door and ‘knocking his head against the brick wall of his bedroom’. In the same year, fifty-nine female patients were secluded whilst seventeen were restrained by mechanical means. This included one patient who was ‘fastened to her bedstead by means of a soft belt round the waist, to hinder her from getting out of bed’ for 365 nights. Other patients were fastened to chairs with soft wristbands to prevent them falling off; another spent forty-two days and nights in a sleeve dress ‘to prevent her denuding herself’ and a few violent patients were restrained to prevent injuring themselves.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when many lunatic asylums expanded and became overcrowded with patients, it became more difficult to implement non-restraint and moral therapy policies. Seclusion with less restraint rather than non-restraint became more common.

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