Page:The Harveian oration 1866.djvu/32

 their remedies. Various restraints of a painful kind were regarded as not only necessary, but beneficial. Many persons supposed that insanity was incurable, and that little or nothing could be done for the unhappy sufferer, but secluding him from the eyes of the world, and preventing him from injuring himself and others. Public asylums were looked upon rather as prisons for dangerous persons than as hospitals for the cure of their malady. Hence it followed, that the treatment of the insane too often passed from the hands of the physician into those of men destitute of all medical knowledge, unfeeling and unprincipled. Then came neglect and cruelty, and all the horrors of which we read:—the manacles and fetters; the iron collars by which the poor creatures were chained to the walls, incarcerated for years in narrow cells, dark, damp, and cold, like mediæval dungeons, and filthy beyond description, or in cages in which they were exposed as a sight for public curiosity, and made a show of like wild beasts; their beds the bare ground, or straw seldom changed; their scanty clothing, or very nakedness; the blows and stripes that aggravated at once their sufferings and their malady, and debased them below the very