"Subject to the provisions hereinafter contained, it shall be lawful for any duly-qualified medical practitioner or other person, by his direction, to receive and entertain as a boarder or patient any person suffering from a nervous disorder, or other mental affection requiring medical care and supervision, but not such as to justify his being taken charge of and detained as a person of unsound mind. No person shall be received without the written request in the form, Schedule --., to this Act, of a relative or friend who derives no profit from the arrangement, and his own consent, in writing, in the form in the same schedule, the signatures to which request and consent respectively shall be witnessed by some inhabitant householder.
"The person receiving such patient shall, within two days after his reception, give notice thereof to the Commissioners in Lunacy, and shall at the same time transmit to the Commissioners a copy of the request and consent aforesaid. It shall be lawful for one or more Commissioners, at any time after the receipt of such notice aforesaid, and from time to time, to visit and examine such patient, with a view to ascertain his mental state and freedom of action; and the visiting Commissioner or Commissioners shall report to the Board the result of their examination and inquiries. No such patient shall be received into a licensed house." Lord Shaftesbury proceeds to say that by this plan "every person, professional or not, who receives a patient into his house, or attends a patient in such circumstances, should notify it to the Commissioners; but we should not require them to notify it until after three months should have elapsed, because a patient might be suffering from brain fever, or a temporary disorder; but I would say that any person accepting or attending a patient in these circumstances should notify it to the Commissioners, after three months shall have elapsed from the beginning of the treatment."
In the after part of his evidence (Query 921, p. 100), his Lordship desired to supply an omission in the preceding clause, viz. to make it compulsory on a medical man attending a nervous patient, and not only the person receiving one, to communicate the fact to the Commissioners, so that they might go and see him, and form their own judgment whether he should or should not be placed under certificate.