Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-995ml Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T06:20:01.946Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The ‘Open-Door System’: Innovation and Controversy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

William Parry-Jones*
Affiliation:
Warneford Hospital, Oxford
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

During the third quarter of the 19th century it became clear that the problem of pauper lunacy was not being contained by the county asylums. Despite much new building, accommodation in asylums was over-crowded; the patient population had become increasingly heterogeneous and therapeutic optimism was waning. The proportion of curable patients in county asylums declined steadily—for example, from 1844 to 1870 the proportion fell from 15 per cent to 7 per cent. The prospect of large-scale institutional confinement, however, did not go unnoticed and alarm was expressed by many contemporary writers. J. T. Arlidge, formerly of St Luke's Hospital, for example, observed that: ‘Many asylums have grown to such a magnitude, that their general management is unwieldy, and their due medical and moral care and supervision an impossibility … in a colossal refuge for the insane, a patient may be said to lose his individuality, and to become a member of a machine … In all cases admitting of recovery, or a material amelioration, a gigantic asylum is a gigantic evil, and, figuratively speaking, a manufactory of chronic insanity.’

Type
Psychiatry in the 1880s
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1984

References

1 Report of Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy (1844). pp. 185–87; and Twenty-Fourth Report of the Commissioners in Lunacy (1870). p. 97.Google Scholar
2 Arlidge, J. T. (1859) On the State of Lunacy and the Legal Provision for the Insane, with Observations on the Construction and Organisation of Asylums. London: Churchill.Google Scholar
3 Parry-Jones, W. Ll. (1981) The model of the Geel Lunatic Colony and its influence on the nineteenth-century asylum system in Britain. In Madhouses, Mad-doctors and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era (ed. Scull, A.). London: Athlone Press.Google Scholar
4 Cameron, W. D. (1882) The philosophy of restraint in the management and treatment of the insane. Journal of Mental Science. 28, 347–56; 519–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 Occasional Notes of the Quarter (1883) The punishment of the insane. Journal of Mental Science, 29, 9397.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 Twenty-Fifth Annual Report of the General Board of Commissioners in Lunacy for Scotland (1883).Google Scholar
7 Psychological Retrospect (1882) Asylum reports for 1880. Journal of Mental Science, 28, 8992.Google Scholar
8 Campbell, J. A. (1884) On escapes, liberty, happiness, and ‘unlocked doors’, as they affect patients in asylums. Journal of Mental Science, 30, 197210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 Psychological Retrospect (1886) Asylum reports. 1885. Journal of Mental Science, 32, 285–86.Google Scholar
10 Psychological Retrospect (1888) Asylum reports. 1886. Journal of Mental Science, 33, 455.Google Scholar
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.