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Outdoor Work as a Remedial Agent in Insanity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2018

Lloyd Francis*
Affiliation:
St. Andrew's Hospital, Northampton

Extract

I propose to consider this subject exclusively in its relation to the insane of the better class. The pauper asylums throughout the country have long been admirably organized in this particular. Every such institution has attached to it a farm, gardens, a multiplicity of workshops, and the appliances for the pursuit of various trades—frequently those special to the locality, as weaving sheds in the West Biding Asylums. In one or another department, all the labourers and artisans, who comprise the majority of the inmates, can find congenial occupation. Manual labour, thus systematically provided for those able and willing to engage in it, is coincidently the source of immense benefit to the mental and physical health of the patients, and of considerable profit to the institution; the pauper lunatic, by one and the same effort, works out his own salvation and helps to pay for his care and treatment; the recovery rate is raised, the rate per head diminished. There is obviously danger of regarding the financial and not the remedial as the paramount consideration; but no instance of such an abuse of therapeutics has ever been brought forward. To the county patient hand-work is neither a novelty nor a hardship: even though his mental obliquity or confusion be such that he fails utterly to comprehend or appreciate the motives of those who urge him to employ himself; yet he is glad to exchange the monotony of ward, airing court, or aimless country walk, for the bustle and activity of farm or shop, with the prospect, may be, of working at his own craft or even acquiring a fresh one.

Type
Part I.—Original Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1887

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