However, without delaying to point out the advantages accruing in minor details of internal arrangements when the principle is carried out, let us briefly examine its merits abstractedly, and in relation to the system in vogue.
1. It assimilates the condition of the patients to that of ordinary life, as far as can be done in a public institution. They are brought together by day into a series of sitting-rooms adapted to the particular class inhabiting them, and varied in fittings and furniture according to the particular use to which they are applied,--as, for instance, for taking meals, or for the lighter sorts of work, indoor amusements, and reading. For the sections, indeed, inhabited by the more refractory and the epileptic, a single day-room would suffice. When thus brought together in rooms, instead of being distributed along a corridor and its divergent apartments, association between the several patients can be more readily promoted; and this is a matter worth promoting, for the insane are morbidly selfish and exclusive. Likewise, it becomes more easy for the attendants to direct and watch them in their amusements or occupations, and to give special attention or encouragement to some one or more of their number without overlooking the rest. Besides this, rooms admit of being arranged and furnished as such apartments should be; whilst, whatever money may be laid out in furnishing and ornamenting corridors, they can never be rendered like any sort of apartment to be met with in the homes of English people. The separation of the sleeping-rooms from the day accommodation also has the similar advantage of meeting the wishes and habits of our countrymen, who always strive to secure themselves a sitting and a bed room apart: and, altogether, it may be said, that in a suite of day-rooms disposed after the plan advocated, and in the perfectly separated bedroom accommodation, there is, to use a peculiarly English word, a _comfort_ completely unattainable by the ward-system, however thoroughly developed.
2. Greater salubrity and greater facilities for warming and ventilation are secured. It will be universally conceded that sleeping-rooms are more healthy when placed above the ground-floor, so as to escape the constant humidity and exhalations from the earth, particularly at night. The system suggested secures this greater salubrity for the majority of the population, who occupy the upper floors during the night; those only being excepted, whom, for some sufficient reason, it is desirable not to move up and down stairs, or not to lodge at night in the immediate vicinity of the rest of the patients. Again, the separation of the apartments for use by day from those occupied at night favours the health of the establishment by rendering ventilation more easy and complete. In a ward occupied all day and all night, the air is subject to perpetual vitiation, and, whilst patients are present, it is, especially in bad weather, difficult or quite unadvisable to attempt thorough ventilation by the natural means of opening windows and doors,--a means which we believe to be preferable to all the schemes of artificial ventilation of all the ingenious engineers who have attempted to make the currents of air and the law of diffusion of gases obedient to their behests. But "the wind bloweth where it listeth," and all the traps set to catch the foul exhalations, and all the jets of prepared fresh air sent in from other quarters, will not serve their bidding: the airy currents will disport themselves pretty much as they please, and intermingle in spite of the solicitations of opposing flues to draw them different ways. But if, on our plan, the apartments for day use are kept completely distinct from those used by night, each set being emptied alternately, a most thorough renewal of air may be obtained by every aperture communicating with the external atmosphere.