This difference, which I and others have experienced, makes me more anxious “to impress these views on others, and especially on those around me, in order that I may not be obliged, from too great a deference to the fears and prejudices of those I most anxiously wish to conciliate, to abridge the exercise and lessen the happy effects of a system which theory and feeling have suggested and compelled me to pursue; and which nearly twenty years’ experience and increased knowledge have confirmed and justified.” { xv}
So important have I considered just views of the insane, that I have added an Appendix for the express purpose of exhibiting a fair average of the general appearance of the insane. With the same view, I have given a few portraits of such of these cases as are now, either themselves, or their friends, dead, or little known. I had the same principle in view in my first publication, which induced me to give cases in regular rotation, “rather,” as I there say, “than the common mode of making a selection of extreme ones, that I might not give a distorted picture of the insane, nor add to the unreasonable horrors and false impressions on their state, as this has, I am convinced, been one cause of an improper spirit and conduct towards them.”
It is scarcely necessary, after what I have already said in the Appendix, again to guard the reader against the mistake of supposing that the cases and treatment described in that Appendix form any data or criterion for judging of the kind of cases and treatment in my own private establishment. The medical swing, for instance, is stated as having been useful, in some violent cases of mania; but this was even then soon laid aside as objectionable; but it would be worse than useless now, because, under a system which does not cultivate the habitual exercise of the vindictive passions, cases in which it was of use, no longer exist. In fact, to have recourse to any means which operates so much on the fears, whatever medical virtues it may appear to possess, is adopting a principal which philosophy and Christianity equally condemn. It ought ever to be the aim of all persons IN POWER to call in no principle but that of the OMNIPOTENCE of SYMPATHY and BENEVOLENCE; and this PRINCIPLE is not to be excluded even from those whose spirits are imprisoned in bodily evils and diseases.