danger of injury from putting the spade and
the hoe into the hands of a large proportion
of insane persons, than from shutting them up
together in idleness, though under the guards
of straps, strait-waistcoats, and chains."

At Hanwell Sir William had been faintly
supported by the officers of the Asylum.
"When I began to reside in the Asylum,"
Dr. Conolly writes, "a year after Sir William
Ellis's residence there had ceased, the use of
mechanical restraints was by no means
limited to cases of violent mania. Instruments
of restraint, of one kind or other, were
so abundant in the wards as to amount, when
collected together, to about six hundred—
half of these being leglocks or handcuffs.
The attendants had abused, as usual, the
latitude of permission allowed them as to
having recourse to such methods, and employed
them for frivolous reasons, chiefly to save
themselves trouble. On the female side of
the asylum, alone, there were forty patients
who were almost at all times in restraints;
fourteen of these were generally in coercion-
chairs. All these patients were freed from
restraints in September, eighteen hundred
and thirty-nine; and, on a careful examination
of thirty-seven of them, who remained
in the asylum two years afterwards, all were
found improved in their conduct. Some, who
had before been considered dangerous, were
constantly employed; and the rest were
harmless and often cheerful."

The details of personal experience given
by Dr. Conolly, are often such as cannot be
read without emotion. The doctor's strong
heart (God bless and reward him!) was in his
work, and the hearts of his readers follow
him in his account of it. To carry on a great
labour of civilisation in a wise and tender
spirit, to be in every high sense a good physician
to the broken-minded, watchful on their
behalf, made happy by the happiness created
for them, is to live above the need of praise.
Nevertheless, it is a noble thing for any one
to win the deserved praise of all his countrymen,
and to be appreciated and respected
most perfectly by those who, had they
competed with him on a meaner course, would
have been called his rivals.

In the book of which we speak, as in his
former work, upon the Indications of Insanity,
Dr. Conolly interests his reader by the most
abundant store of anecdote and illustration,
chiefly drawn from experience, partly from
reading, with which he defines every point of
his argument. The practical tone of his own
mind suggests this manner of writing, and it
is the most effectual that can be used by any
one who would at once interest and convince
the English public.

For several years after eighteen hundred
and thirty-nine, the progress of the non-
restraint system in England was slow, and, as
we have said, a certain amount of strait-
waistcoating is still advocated by physicians
on the continent. Under the new system, a
patient when unmanageably violent is placed,
with every limb free, in a light and cheerful
padded room where no harm can be done, and
is watched through an eye-hole in the door.
The consequence is, that the violence rapidly
abates for want of exciting objects to sustain it;
the patient frequently lies down and sleeps, and,
when quiet,—that is to say, usually in an hour
or two—is taken out, washed, soothed, well
fed and trusted. The opponents of the system
make a bugbear of the padded room and preach
that patients are more soothed by strapping
up in a strait-waistcoat. So, in the early days
of the reform at Hanwell, "physician and
superintendents of the asylum wrote against
it, reasoned against it, expressed themselves
angrily against it; but scarcely any of them
devoted any time to observing it. A few
reflecting men were happily found who did
devote more than an hour or two, or
than even a day or two, to watching the
results of non-restraint. One of these," Dr.
Conolly writes, " was Mr. Gaskell, now a
commissioner in lunacy; and it is well known
that he adopted the system, and carried it
out with singular ability and success in the
large Asylum of Lancaster, where he had to
control many patients whose provincial
character was proverbially rough and brutal.
There—as at Hanwell—walls were lowered,
iron bars removed, the means of exercise
and recreation increased, so as to introduce
the whole system of non-restraint into an
asylum then containing six hundred patients."

Equally good work was done also by the
late Dr. Anderson in the lunatic asylum
attached to Haslar Hospital. In that place
"the view of the sea, of Portsmouth harbour
and of the Isle of Wight, was shut out by
very high walls. Dr. Anderson had not
been long there before everything underwent
a favourable change. Restraints were
entirely abolished, iron bars disappeared, the
boundary walls were lowered, the patients
were allowed to walk upon the grass, summer-
houses were built and pleasant seats provided
commanding a view of the sea, and the
cheerful scenes most congenial to the inmates;
knives and forks were brought into use, and
the whole of this noble asylum assumed an
air of tranquil comfort. The patients soon
had a large boat provided for them, in which
their good physician did not hesitate to
trust himself with parties of them, in fishing-
excursions. In the first of these little voyages
a patient, whose voice had not been
heard for years, was so delighted with his
success that he counted his fish aloud."

No inconvenience or accident followed upon
these changes. Violent patients became
quiet, and recovered bits of their wrecked
minds; the useless and hopeless became
trustworthy and industrious, all exchanged
misery for happiness. At Glasgow, Dr. Hutcheson
proved the immense importance of the
new system, so thoroughly, that when the new
asylum was built at Gartnavel, near Glasgow,