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Hearing Voices. Brendan Kelly
Читать онлайн.Название Hearing Voices
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isbn 9781911024446
Автор произведения Brendan Kelly
Издательство Ingram
The Richmond Joint Committee dutifully appointed a ‘special committee’ to look into the matter, and the committee visited asylums at Youghal,57 Cork and Downpatrick, and inspected Union Workhouses in North and South Dublin.58 The committee examined patient numbers, clinical conditions and financial arrangements and reported back to the Richmond Joint Committee on 19 December 1907.
Downpatrick Asylum was of particular interest because ‘Down County Council in 1901, after the fullest examination into the fiscal aspect of the question, decided to enlarge the Downpatrick Asylum for the reception of the insane then located in the workhouses’.59 The committee presented details of the accommodation provided at Downpatrick and agreed with the Inspector of Lunatics who, on 16 November 1906, concluded that ‘this county is amongst the few in Ireland which has made full provision for all the insane chargeable to it […]. Nowhere are the insane better housed in bright, cheerful, well-furnished and well-heated wards, where they are properly cared for, well fed, and well clothed’.60
The committee also visited North Dublin workhouse, where they found ‘that the provision for the inmates of the lunatic departments is truly deplorable. The overcrowding is very marked, and calls for prompt relief’.61 The female ward for ‘healthy lunatics’ is ‘little more than a dungeon, ventilation is inadequate, and the beds are laid upon wooden trestles. The patients are obliged to take their meals in this repellent place’.62 The male wards ‘are much overcrowded […]. Forty-two of the patients are confined to bed, 20 of them being of the dirty class. Ten patients have to be spoonfed’. The committee concluded that ‘all buildings occupied by the lunatic patients are deficient in light and air’ and ‘all lunatic inmates of the North Dublin Union Workhouse ought to be removed as speedily as possible’.63 Dr Fottrell at the workhouse ‘supplied us with a list of 60 patients, 20 males and 40 females, with an urgent request that these be provided for without delay’.64 The committee also visited South Dublin Union Workhouse where their ‘experiences were much more agreeable’.65
In the end, the committee made four recommendations to the Richmond District Asylum Joint Committee. First, they urged the Joint Committee ‘to assume the full responsibility imposed upon them by the Local Government Act of 1898 with respect to pauper lunatics within the district’.66 Second, they recommended ‘that provision for the 600 patients should be made by the erection of suitable buildings at Portrane, where ample space for that purpose is available’.67 Third, they concluded that ‘a thorough classification and segregation of our existing inmates at Richmond and Portrane would secure an immediate reduction in our cost of maintenance’. Finally, ‘inasmuch as the condition of things in the North Dublin Union Workhouse requires prompt remedy’, they suggested ‘that the Portrane Committee be instructed to make immediate provision in the temporary buildings at their disposal for the patients whose removal is applied for by Dr Fottrell’. The Joint Committee adapted all four recommendations on 19 December 1907.
Notwithstanding these measures, the problem of the mentally ill in Irish workhouses remained a concern well into the 1900s. In 1913, for example, despite the transfer of 58 patients from the South Dublin Union to the Richmond Asylum, the number in the Union continued to increase, to 202.68 There were similar problems at the North Dublin Union. Clearly the workhouses presented a persistent problem, regardless of how large the asylums themselves became.
Ultimately, the number of ‘mentally ill’ persons in workhouses finally began to decrease from the highs of the 1890s down to 1,821 in 1919, and generally declined further (in analogous establishments) throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.69 Notwithstanding this reduction, however, a range of challenges remained, not least of which was the plight of the intellectually disabled in the asylums and various other establishments in the early 1900s. These are considered next.
The Intellectually Disabled in the Nineteenth Century: ‘Verily We Are Guilty in This Matter’
The fate of the intellectually disabled in early-nineteenth-century Ireland was similar in many respects to that of the mentally ill. There was minimal dedicated provision, with the result that intellectually disabled persons were cared for at home, admitted to workhouses or, increasingly, committed to the growing number of asylums for the mentally ill.70
The 1843 rules for the operation of asylums provided specifically for the admission of the intellectually disabled and it was estimated that there was a total of 6,127 intellectually disabled persons in Ireland at that time.71 Precise numbers varied, but the Inspectors of Lunatics calculated that, in 1851, there were 3,562 ‘idiots’ ‘at large’; 202 in asylums; 13 in prisons; and 1,129 in workhouses, yielding a total of 4,906.72 By 1861, the number in asylums had doubled (to 403) and the total number risen to 7,033.
During the 1860s, Cheyne Brady, a member of the Royal Irish Academy, governor of the Meath Hospital,73 and prolific author on social matters, was notably exercised by this issue and wrote a pamphlet on The Training of Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Children, grimly outlining the position of the intellectually disabled in nineteenth-century Ireland and elsewhere (using contemporaneous terminology that some readers might find disturbing):
It is not very long since we used to see boys and girls, and sometimes stunted men and women, running wild in our streets and villages in a state of idiocy […]. They were carefully avoided, as the continual worrying of the village urchins had soured their tempers and rendered them in some cases dangerous.
Then, again, on visiting the poor, we have from time to time seen a bundle of rags in a corner, and, on inquiry, have ascertained that it contained an idiot child, living in dirt and degradation, worse than one would permit his dog or pig to live in.
Prejudice and popular ignorance respecting them have led to strange treatment of this afflicted class. By the Hindoo [sic] they are superstitiously venerated, while by many Europeans these helpless creatures have been regarded as human beings without souls. Some poor parents fancy that, as their children cannot remember what they hear, their brain must be soft, and apply poultices of oak-bark in order to tan or harden the fibres; others, finding it impossible to make any impression on the mind, conclude that the brain is too hard, and they torture their unhappy offspring with hot poultices of bread and milk, or plaster the skull with tar, keeping it on for a long time. Others, again, give mercury to act as a solder to close up the supposed crevices in the brain […]. The utmost stretch of humanity has hitherto thrust them out of sight in our workhouses, where they are suffered to exist uncared for and untaught.74
Brady presented a call to action, suggesting the opening of asylums for the intellectually disabled, as had already occurred in Bath (1846), Highgate (1848) and elsewhere:75
And if it cannot be gainsayed that the condition of the idiot and imbecile can be thus improved, is not our duty plain?
But what shall we answer for our past neglect? Verily we are guilty in this matter.
The future, however, is before us. Shall we not redeem the time, and gird up our loins to make up for past deficiency by a strenuous effort on behalf of this neglected class?
There are three courses open for adoption:-
I.The foundation of a general institution for the reception of all degrees of idiocy, from the hopeless to the most improvable.
II.The opening of an asylum for the pure idiots, who are not susceptible of much improvement, but who can be housed, cared for, and cured of bad habits.
III.The establishment of a training school for the improvable cases, where, as in the asylums of which I have attempted a description, they may be trained to habits of usefulness, rendered able to earn a livelihood, and be taught the way of salvation.76
Brady’s words inspired immediate activism on the part of George Hugh Kidd, an obstetric surgeon in Dublin,77 who penned An Appeal on Behalf of the Idiotic and Imbecile Children of Ireland, seeking the building of an