tendril whose lives were either directly, or
indirectly, on his head, he did the best he
could, as I learnt afterwards, to keep Dowsie
John out of the poorhouse for the remainder
of his life.

THINGS WITHIN DR. CONOLLY'S
REMEMBRANCE.

Most of our readers know that one of the
best achievements of the present century is a
complete reversal, in the treatment of madness,
of opinions and practice which had previously
been in force for five-and-twenty
centuries at least. The change has been
justified in a most striking manner, as we
have shown from time to time, and illustrated
not very long since by a sketch of the present
state of Bedlam. The blessing of it has been
secured to England—and, by the example of
England, more widely and certainly diffused
among civilised nations—mainly by help of
the wise energy of DR. JOHN CONOLLY.

The change of which we speak began in
France and England almost at one time. To
dark cells and desolate courts, sufferers from
mental disease were remitted as their fitting
place of habitation; terrible men, armed with
whips, were not their servants, but their
masters; they were dressed in chains and
manacles; they who most needed human
care, rotted on filthy litters, with the rats for
their companions, by whom they were
sometimes attacked and wounded. Such care as
was had of the insane was better in England
than in France before the time of the first
great French Revolution. The two large
asylums of Paris were the Bicêtre and the
Salpêtrière, of which the former was the
worse. Wretched and filthy beings crouched
in cold, damp cells no larger than was necessary
to contain their bodies—six feet square—
to which air and light came through the door
only: in which there was no table, no chair,
no bed, but a dog's litter of straw, seldom
renewed. The patients, loaded with chains,
were defenceless against the brutality of
keepers, who were selected from among the
malefactors in the jails. But it happened, in
the days of the great Revolution, that three
sensible men—named Cousin, Thouret, and
Cabanis, all of them friends of the physician
PINEL—were administrators of the hospitals
of Paris. They deplored what they saw at
the Bicêtre, and they had faith in their friend
Pinel, whom they appointed the physician to
that institution. Towards the end of the
year seventeen hundred and ninety-two, he
entered on his duties there, and " with him
entered pity, goodness, and justice."

That was the first faint ray of hope for an
improved condition of the lunatic in France.
It is curious that at precisely the same period
the first step in this path of reform should
have been made—one might say, accidentally
—in England. It happened that in the year
seventeen hundred and ninety-one, a Quakeress
was placed in the York Asylum by friends
living at a distance. They requested some
acquaintances to visit her; but to these
admission was denied, and in a few weeks the
patient died. The management of the asylum
had been falling into some discredit; but the
Quakers said no evil of it,—they simply
resolved to establish an asylum of their own,
and founded the Retreat at York, which, in
a few years, they opened. Of this institution
the late WILLIAM TUKE of York, and his
grandson, SAMUEL TUKE, have been the chief
promoters. It was the first in Europe—the
first in the world—at which the right treatment
of the lunatic was clearly indicated.
Five-and-forty years ago, Samuel Tuke told
his countrymen, in an account of the Retreat
at York, not very much less than they have
now learnt to believe upon the subject. ESQUIROL
was at that time in Paris the successor
of Pinel. He had succeeded him in the year
eighteen hundred and ten, and, after visiting
almost every asylum in France, represented,
in the year eighteen hundred and eighteen,
that he found the insane naked or covered
only with rags, littered in straw upon damp
pavements, fettered and bound in iron belts
and collars—chains being preferred to
strait-waistcoats by reason of their greater
cheapness—fastened sometimes to the wall by a
fetter eighteen inches long; a method of
treatment which was extolled as being
peculiarly calming. Esquirol vigorously used his
influence for the abatement of these evils,
and he was the first who gave practical
instruction to students of medicine in the
management of mental disorders. His name
ranks therefore with the foremost in the
history of the reformed treatment of lunacy.

The need of it was almost as great in
England as in France, long after the first
reform in the Bicêtre and the founding of
the York Retreat. Nearly forty years afterwards,
in a large private asylum near London,
several of the pauper women were chained
to their bedsteads, naked, or only covered
with an hempen rag; and this in the month
of December. One towel a week was allowed
for the use of one hundred and seventy
patients, and some were mopped with cold
water in the severest weather. Seventy out
of about four hundred were almost invariably
in irons. Only seven years ago, there were
some licensed houses in our provinces where
patients, male and female, were confined at
night in outhouses, without fire or any means
of warmth, without light, attendance, or
protection; there were no baths, there was no
medical treatment. Again, in a report of the
Commissioners in Lunacy not more than
eleven years old, we read of licensed houses
which fed lunatics upon from four and a-half
to six ounces of bread, with skimmed milk, for
breakfast and supper, and gave them for
dinner on three days in the week what was
called a meat and potato pie; the proportion
of meat being less than an ounce for each
patient. On two days in the week soup and