"The requirement occasionally made by the Visiting Commissioner, that the Master shall make a written record of such proceedings, is utterly neglected. The dark, strong cells, constructed for the solitary confinement of refractory paupers, are used for the punishment of the insane, merely to prevent trouble; quiet helpless creatures, from whom no violence could be apprehended, are kept in bed during the daytime, or coerced; and even the dead-house has been made to serve the purpose of a seclusion-room."
"The Examples of Restraint practised," as adduced in the Report, recall to mind all those barbarities which civilized men of the present day are in the habit of congratulating themselves as matters of the past, and the subject of history. The catalogue of appliances for restraint reappears once more on the scene; and we read of straps, leather muffs, leg-locks, hobbles, chains and staples, strait-jackets, and other necessary paraphernalia, as of yore, worn for days, or weeks, or months. Excellent matter, indeed, in all this, to garnish a discourse on the advancement of civilization, on the prevalence of improved notions respecting the treatment of the insane, or on some similar topic addressed to the vanity of the present generation!
But the chapter does not end here. "It would be difficult to select places so entirely unfit for the purpose of exercise, or so prejudicial to the mental or bodily state of the person confined," as the yards or spaces set apart for it; and yet "of all the miseries undergone by this afflicted class, under the manifold disadvantages before described, and of all the various sources of irritation and discomfort to which we have shown that they are exposed, there is probably none which has a worse effect than the exclusion from all possibility of healthy movement. Nothing more powerfully operates to promote tranquillity than the habit of extensive exercise; and in its absence, the patients often become excited, and commit acts of violence more or less grave, exposing them at once to restraint or seclusion, and not unfrequently to punishment. In not a few instances the outbreak has been looked upon as an offence or breach of discipline, and as the act of a responsible person; and the patient has been taken before a magistrate and committed to prison.