Lost men.
--In a very interesting paper, published in the
Medical Times and Gazettes, Dr. Connolly says:
‘
‘"The diversities of life in
London furnished occasional cases to
Hanwell scarcely to be met with in asylums remoter from the capital-- the cases of men more or less educated, and who, from some imperfection of mind or infirmity of disposition, had fallen out of their own rank in life, and, by slow degrees, had sunk into destitution; or, after long contention with the troubled currents of town existence, were wrecked and cast ashore like things unregarded and valueless.
Ingenious and ambitious men, not very systematically educated; or men of imagination and feeling, but wanting self-government; and also some who had studied at the universities and brought away some fragments of learning, and perhaps a cultivated taste, but no solid acquirement — sometimes appeared among the new arrivals from the workhouses, where misery had made them acquainted with strange bedfellows.--The situation of men of this kind, when first shut up with pauper lunatics, clothed like them, taking their meals with them, conforming to the general hours of rising and going to bed, often very different from those to which they have been accustomed, could not be regarded without a sort of commiseration.
A full sense of the condition to which they have suck becomes to some of them then only a reality.
The illusions kept up by various speculative undertakings, or by wild companions, or by successive vicious stimulants, are suddenly extinguished, and thoughts of other days, when they were younger and full of promise and of hope, revert to them painfully, after long forgetfulness of what dissipation, and idleness, and schemes innumerable seemed to have obliterated from their mind.
Some of the unfortunate men thus situated — for women seemed less conscious of their position in such circumstances — became desponding and disposed to suicide; but the greater part sustained themselves with fortitude.
In reality, the life they entered upon on becoming patients had many compensations.
There were ready for them on arrival a supper of bread and cheese, with wholesome beer; no ardent spirits could be obtained, but then no night-wanderings awaited them.
There was the comfort of a clean bed. The morning light no longer awoke them to a sense of uncertainty of breakfast and sufficient food for the day.--They walked out in pleasant grounds; they had an ample and wholesome daily dinner; and they heard simple and beautiful prayers read in the chapel, of which the words had once been familiar to their ears.
Nor were minor consolations wanting.
They generally excited sympathy in the store-room and in the shops of the workmen; and slight additions to the fashion of the asylum clothing, a book now and then, and pens, and ink, and paper, filled up the measure of their unwonted content."’
’
