Foundling asylum

“ Thousands of widowed mothers, learning that they can marry again if not encumbered with children, are putting their little ones in asylums. The asylum thus offers a premium to child-desertion. Rich people even are living in luxury, while their nephews, nieces, and grandchildren are being corrupted in orphan asylums! The niece of a President of the United States was, not long ago, in an asylum, while her uncle, aunt, and three cousins, occupied the White House! Such people often give as their excuse that the child was too vicious, or rude, or even homely, to be received into their families. ”

“ Is it, in short, not a radical error in the direction of an asylum, to place the inmates in such a position and under such circumstances, as to make them feel themselves workmen under compulsion, regularly employed, dealt with only as labourers and artisans, by being kept all day in their workshops, and in the evening and night brought together, because they are workers, and unlike the other residents of the asylum, who will in their opinion come to be regarded, as unlike themselves,—as the fitting occupants, and the only patients? ”

“ Disappointment too is felt by patients rather at discovering that on their discharge from one asylum they are to be [Pg 128] transferred to another, instead of being set at liberty and returned to their homes; for few of the insane recognize their malady, and they will think much less about the character of the asylum they are in, than their confinement and restricted liberty. Again, it is not at all necessary to contrast the two institutions, by calling the one an asylum for curables, and the other an asylum for incurables ”

“ In fact, the annual returns of county asylum experience demonstrate that the transmission to asylums is regulated by no rule, and is attended by great abuses.
The practical lesson deducible from this is, that the matter must be placed in other hands, and guided according to some rational principles. The insane poor must no longer be left to pine in neglect and misery in their own homes, until their friends tire of the trouble of them, or some casual circumstance class them, in a relieving officer’s opinion, as proper candidates for an asylum ”

“ An average of seventeen hundred women this asylum harbors; the asylum for men up on Ward's Island even more. Altogether 1,419 patients were admitted to the city asylums for the insane in 1889, and at the end of the year 4,913 remained in them. There is a constant ominous increase in this class of helpless unfortunates that are thrown on the city's charity. ”

“ Can it be proved that the above named cities ever had sixty patients in that asylum at any one time? It would take a hundred such asylums to take all that the State of New York would furnish if each county should send as many as the city of Utica, according to their number of inhabitants. ”

“ If the law were so amended that asylum relief should be afforded to all on the appearance of their malady, the majority of those to be provided for in lodgings would come from the class of chronic, imbecile patients, accounted harmless, whose discharge from the asylum under proper surveillance might be recommended. ”

“ I do not oppose the insane asylum—but I abhor and condemn the cut-throat system that robs man of his reason, drives him to insanity and makes the lunatic asylum an indispensable adjunct to every civilized community. ”

“ When he took charge of the Richmond Asylum it was insanitary and overcrowded, and more like a prison than a hospital. He introduced a humane regime, made the wards bright and comfortable, and found regular occupation for some 75 per cent, of the patients. By his advice a large branch asylum was built a few miles away in the country. In 1894, and again in 1896, 1897, and 1898, the asylum was visited by beri-beri, the outbreak in 1894 being specially severe. ”

“ While there are drawbacks unavoidably arising from the congregating of so many of the insane in one establishment, there is nothing connected with Seacliff Asylum to justify the common expression, "the horrors of a lunatic asylum." It is a home, as far as such a large institution of the kind can be made a home, where everything possible is done for the welfare and recovery of the unfortunate people on whose account it exists. ”

“ There is a state of mind that is not unfavorably affected [Pg 141] by placing them in the asylum—such for instance as one under the influence of hallucinations—there are many in that institution who believe they own the asylum, they think they run the institution with all its machinery! ”

“ There are many out in the world doing business quite as crazy as they. These, I know, are all groaning to get free, but their friends prefer to keep them there, and as property doubtless has much to do with the matter, they will be likely to die in the institution. Were they county patients, they would long before now have been set at liberty.
There is one case in the asylum that I will venture to name, because I am quite sure he would prefer to have me do so. ”

“ If a gendarme accosted me at night in the streets, I shook all over in the expectation of being removed to a French [Pg 122] asylum. If I saw an advertisement relating to an asylum in a casual newspaper, it was to lay it down in terror. There seemed to me but one power in the world—the power of the lunacy ‘law.’ Such is the confidence which our vaunted system, which professes to know no wrong without a remedy, could inspire in one who needed its protection so sorely as I. In one respect its might was certainly vindicated, for, abroad and at home, I thought that it could reach me anywhere. ”

“ She represents to him the outer world; for she is the only creature belonging to it who ever crosses the threshold of his prison. The asylum chaplain, the asylum doctor, the keepers and the officials belonging to the asylum—all these are part and parcel of this great prison-house of stone, brick, and mortar and seem to be about as capable of feeling for him, listening to him, or understanding him, as the stones, bricks, and mortar themselves. ”

“ Some were on foot, bearing in their countenances the tokens of their recent terror, and filled with mournful reflections on the forlornness of their state. Few had secured to themselves an asylum; some were without the means of paying for victuals or lodging for the coming night; others, who were not thus destitute, yet knew not whither to apply for entertainment, every house being already overstocked with inhabitants, or barring its inhospitable doors at their approach. ”

“ But when they pack themselves up inside a wall, without even a bell, or if they have one with only fierce dogs to answer it, all we can do is to leave them to the Police, or the Government, or the Newspapers. The right of asylum is sacred in England. Of Continental intrigues we know nothing, and we refuse to be mixed up with them. ”

“ It is of great importance not merely to exclude from the [district] asylums those who, by reason of violence or irritability, are proper subjects for the county asylum, but also those who, from old age or disease, are unfit for the journey to the asylum, or who, from the slight degree to which their mind is affected, might more properly remain in the workhouse. ”

“ The law for us is the law for them. The nervous maladies which attack us, attack tenfold their more delicate organisation; and they are no safer from wrong or selfishness than we. How many times over, to name one danger alone, may the fancies of puerperal fever be miscalled madness, and treated—in these places and among these companions—so? Our wives and our sisters are not very safe from the Bastille, as things now are.
My time went on. During the bitter winter months the asylum was in the hands of workmen, under repair. ”

“ In the most of cases the patient is not consulted in the matter. In some cases, however, the patient is consulted, and consents to go; is made to believe that the asylum is like any other infirmary or hospital, where patients are taken to be nursed and cared for, and cured if possible. In the most of cases, perhaps, there is a kind of dread and horror attending a patient taken to the asylum, and very many go against their will. This opposition is generally attributed to their insanity, and is too generally received as evidence that such an one is a fit subject for a lunatic asylum. ”

“ It is one of the factors which the Immigration and Naturalization Service must take into account to determine whether a refugee seeks asylum in this country as a consequence of his flight to avoid persecution. ”

“ If during the operation of the immigration scheme something like a proper system of selection had been adopted, many of the unsuitable persons brought to the colony would have been allowed to remain at Home, to their own and the colony's advantage. Still further, it has to be borne in mind that many of our asylum inmates, such as epileptics and silly, useless, but harmless creatures, would not in the Home country be ranked as lunatics or be placed in asylums. ”

“ It is not strange that many of all the classes mentioned should be found in the asylum, but to see the imbecile and driveling idiot thrown into a lunatic asylum, carries prima facie evidence with it, that the object in placing them there was not to prevent their doing injury to themselves or others, nor for their recovery from their unfortunate state, for many of these were born so. ”

“ There is but one exception to this barbarous code, it is when an enemy voluntarily seeks a refuge in one of their villages. As long as 70 he remains in it, his asylum is inviolable—his life is more safe than it would be in his own wigwam. ”

“ It is, as its name signifies, an institution with a benevolent purpose, an orphan asylum and foundling hospital in one. The State here charitably considers that infants who are abandoned by their parents are as much orphaned as they can become by the interposition of death,—nay, more. The death of parents oftenest leaves a child with some friend or relative; but the foundling is cut off from all human relationship,—he belongs only to the hand that takes him up, where he has been left to die. ”

“ There should be no spot within the boundaries of any country independent of the laws. Every citizen should be followed by their power, as every substance is followed by its shadow. There is only a difference of degree between impunity and the right of asylum; and as the effective influence of punishment consists more in its inevitability than in its violence, asylums do more to invite to crimes than punishments do to deter from them. The multiplication of asylums is the formation of so many petty sovereignties ”

“ Such is asylum life.
I know one man, a dentist, who has been in the asylum ten times at least. There is a young man by the name of Bouck, from Schoharie, who has often been in the asylum. He comes under a high pressure of excitement; stays a few months and leaves. But while there, is regarded the lion of the establishment; fears nothing; is a giant in strength; will dash out windows with iron grates as though they were made of cobwebs; will climb on the side of the wall where no sane man would dare to venture. For such a case, perhaps the asylum is of some value. ”

“ They stated, with truth, that from time immemorial it was their custom to afford an asylum to anyone demanding it, and that to surrender a man who had sought and found shelter with them would be a disgrace which they could not endure. ”

“ A glance at the annual reports of our lunatic asylums reveals the main occupations of the inmates and the apparent causes of their attacks. In a county asylum like Wilts the great majority of patients are farm-laborers, with their wives and daughters ”

“ If the re-unions that take place in this old fort consecrate it to humanity, and make it a temple of affection, its disappointments make it a theater for melodramas and tragedies in reality. Last year one hundred and fifty-three emigrants were sent to the insane asylum on Ward’s Island, East River, a large proportion of whom were young people, and a majority women. They come over to find their mates, and either do not meet them, or worse, find they have lost them indeed. ”

“ Every criminal who landed there was safe. There were in every suburb almost as many places of asylum as gallows. It was the abuse of impunity by the side of the abuse of punishment; two bad things which strove to correct each other. The palaces of the king, the hotels of the princes, and especially churches, possessed the right of asylum. Sometimes a whole city which stood in need of being repeopled was temporarily created a place of refuge. Louis XI. made all Paris a refuge in 1467. ”

“ The argument is, that many great and noted men have been inmates of the asylum, such as Gerrit Smith, Esquire W., General B. and Judge C. This was the argument used on me while on my way to the prison. I would go still further. I would require that the [Pg 36] managers of such an institution should not leave to one man the destinies of so many hundreds of souls; that they should be required to see for themselves all the internal workings of the institution, that its evils may not become chronic and incurable. ”

“ Most of the asylums of the Republic also receive boarders at fixed terms, varying according to the accommodation desired; hence there are very few private asylums in the States. In the State of New York there is a special legal provision intended to encourage the early removal of recent cases to the asylum; whereby persons not paupers, whose malady is of less than one year’s duration, are admitted without payment, upon the order of a county judge, granted to an application made to him, setting forth the recent origin of the attack and the limited resources of the patient. ”