Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/72

64 is very limited. In fact, the Belgian asylums send their incurables here so far as they can; and of the whole number of patients cared for, seventy-eight per cent are classed as incurable. The system works unfavorably for the colony relatively in a double way—by diminishing the number of failures to cure in the close asylums, and by correspondingly increasing the number at Gheel. Undoubtedly, the régime at Gheel is favorable even to incurables, but it is more so to curable cases, and it is to be regretted that the colony is not put in a position to make a more obvious proof of it. The proportion of deaths is raised in appearance by the same cause. From 1860 to 1875, the proportion of deaths varied from five to ten per cent, rising to the latter figure only twice. Such proportions are not, however, exaggerated, and, if we consider the hopeless character of the disease of the majority of the patients, we shall find that Gheel, if it can not heal incurables, keeps them in life and health for many years.

The insane population has recently increased very fast. In 1840 there were 717 patients; in 1855, 778; in 1866, 1,035; in 1872, 1,118; in 1879, 1,383; in 1883, 1,663. The increase is partly owing to the growing willingness of the people to receive patients, and partly to the improved administrative and medical service, which makes it more obvious that, with their liberty, persons sent there will not be uncared for. As to nationality, most of the patients are Belgians; after whom come Dutch, a few French, and fewer Germans and English. Among the cases are some who have passed most of their lives at Gheel. One is recorded as having died after a residence of fifty years; another stayed there fifty-two years; and residences of from forty to fifty years are not rare.

In what does this family treatment consist? The lunatic is taken from his habitual environment, from the society of those among whom he fell ill. They exist for him only in memory; they are not there to remind him continually of a melancholy subject, and to keep up the current of ideas in which he is involved, A new life is opened before him, with new faces, in a new country; everything is a subject of distraction to him; and, on the other hand, he has not the continual feeling that he is in a close asylum, with a door he can not pass through, and a wall over which he can not look. He is not in perpetual contact with lunatics, and is not subjected to a depressing influence. He enjoys the privilege of physical activity, and of life in the open air with sound-minded people, who are all the time diverting him from his preoccupations. He has even little children asking him to amuse them, and winning his attention, in spite of himself, perhaps, from himself. He is part of the family; they become attached to him, and he becomes attached to them. No one laughs at him, no one mocks him, he is never the object of any kind of demonstration, but all take him for what he is, an innocent. That is the family treatment at Gheel—isolation without solitude.