Page:American journal of insanity volume 2.djvu/373

1840.] Labor, 360 er by mechanical restraint, by seclusion in a room, or by the arms, hands or eyes of attendants, is a question that must be determined by the circumstances of the individual case, not by theoretical considerations.

Labor.—The employment of the patients in some form of useful labor, is practised in all the institutions I visited, and in some to an extent quite unparalleled, I apprehend, in this country. It is stated by the Metropolitan Commissioners, that at the Wakefield Asylum, 120 out of 208 male patients, and 135 out of 190 female patients, Were employed in various ways, and in several more, I should think the proportion of laboring patients was equally large. At the last named institution, I was shown piles of fancy articles made by the female patients, sufficient with similar accumulations at Hanwell, to set up a respectable shop in Broadway. Such exhibitions were frequent, especially in asylums situated in the manufacturing districts, and in passing through their workshops, I often thought that a stranger would require farther proof before he could believe that he was not rather within the walls of a factory than of a hospital for the insane. At Belfast, for instance, it Was quite a sight to behold the number of old women spinning flax with their little foot-wheels, and the rows of looms at which a set of cheerful- looking men were making every kind and quality of linen. No factory presents a scene of busier activity than is daily witnessed in some of the English establishments for the insane. In one room may be seen a party making mats; in another a corps of basket-makers are plying the osiers into fanciful or useful forms; farther on is a knot of shoe-makers, and in the building across the court, a joiner's shop gives employment to those who have a fancy for edge-tools. The blacksmith, the mason, the painter, the weaver, may also find their representatives within the same institution, and in the Surrey, where almost every body seemed to be doing something, I observed a couple of men very demurely knitting stockings. Agricultural labor, I found, was a fa-