"The twenty-eight idiots have, with few exceptions, been sent to the asylum from union houses, where it has been found undesirable to detain them, on account either of their violent conduct, or of their dirty habits, or some other peculiarity connected with their state of mental deficiency; habits of noise or indecency for instance."
Probably the following extract from the Report of the Committee of the Surrey Asylum (1856) may have more weight with some minds than any of the arguments and illustrations previously adduced, to prove that the detention of presumed "harmless patients" in workhouses will not answer. The declaration against the plan on the part of the Surrey magistrates is the more important, because they put it into practice with the persuasion that it would work well. But to let them speak for themselves, they write,--"The committee adverted at considerable length in their last Annual Report to the circumstance of the asylum being frequently unequal to the requirements of the County, and of their intention to attempt to remedy the defect by discharging all those patients, who, being harmless and inoffensive, it was considered might be properly taken care of in their respective union houses.
"The plan has been tried, and has not been successful. Patients who, under the liberal and gentle treatment they experience in the asylum, are quiet and tractable, are not necessarily so under the stricter regulations of a workhouse; indeed, so far as the experiment has been tried, the reverse has been found to be the case; most of the patients so discharged having been shortly afterwards returned to the asylum, or placed in some other institution for the insane, in consequence of their having become, with the inmates of the workhouse, 'a mutual annoyance to each other.' Any arrangement, short of an entire separation from the other inmates of the workhouse, will be found to be inefficient." This is the same as saying that if lunatics are to reside in workhouses, a special asylum must be instituted in the establishment for their care, and the comfort and safety of the other inmates.
If the well-being of the insane were the only question to be settled, no difficulty would attend the solution, for experience has most clearly evidenced the vast advantages of asylums over workhouses as receptacles for insane patients, whatever the form or degree of their malady. Dr. Bucknill has some very forcible remarks in his paper on "The Custody of the Insane Poor" (Asylum Journal, vol. iv. p. 460), with illustrative cases; and in his Report last quoted, reverts to this subject of the relative advantages of asylums and workhouses; but we forbear to quote, if only from fear of being thought to enlarge unduly upon a question which has been decided long ago by the observation and experience of all those concerned in the management of the pauper insane; viz. that whatever the type and degree of mental disorder and of fatuity, its sufferers become improved in properly managed asylums, as intellectual, moral, and social beings upon removal from workhouses; and by a reverse transfer, are deteriorated in mind, and rendered more troublesome and more costly. To the workhouse the lunatic ward is an excrescence, and its inmates an annoyance: in its organization, there is an absence or deficiency of almost all those means conducive to remedy or remove the mental infirmity, and the very want of which contributes as much as positive neglect and maltreatment to render the patient's condition worse, by lowering his mental and moral character. But such deterioration or degradation is not an isolated evil, or the mere negation of a better state; for it acts as a positive energy in developing moral evil, and brings in its train perverseness, destructiveness, loss of natural decency in habits, conversation and conduct, and many other ills which render their subjects painfully humiliating as human beings, and a source of trouble, annoyance, and expense to all those concerned with them.