CHAPTER X. IRELAND. I HAVE already spoken of the singular tradition which for so long a period invested the Glen-na-galt, near Tralee, with the character of possessing healing virtues in madness. The change which in our practical age has taken place in Kerry, by the substitution of a wellordered asylum at Killarney, for popular superstitious practices, represents what has been going on throughout the whole of Ireland during the last half century or more. After examining all the Acts bearing on the provision for the insane from the earliest period, and the evidence given before Parliamentary Committees, I must say I find a very large amount of strenuous effort and labour devoted to the improvement of the condition of lunatics, miserably situated as they formerly were in general, when confined in houses of industry or at home in hovels, where their needs could not possibly be attended to, even when, as was doubtless frequently the case, they were regarded with great affection. Sometimes they were looked upon as possessed, and then the appropriate forms of the Church of Rome were employed. 394 SELECT COMMITTEE. In the evidence given before the Select Committee on the Lunatic Poor in Ireland in 1817, Mr. John Leslie Foster, a governor of the Richmond Asylum,* stated that he had seen two or three lunatics in one bed in the house of industry. There were fifty or sixty in one room. In the same room a lunatic was chained in a bed, the other half of which was occupied by a sane pauper, and the room was so occupied by beds that there was scarcely space to move in it. Mr. Rice stated that when he visited the Clonwell Asylum in 1814-15, the patients were not clothed; some were lying in the yard on the straw in a state of nakedness. At Limerick he found the accommodation for the patients "such as we should not appropriate for our dog-kennels." There was one open arcade, behind which cells were constructed with stone floors, without any mode of heating or of ventilation, and exposed during the whole of the winter to the extremities of the weather. Thirteen cells were provided for thirty-three lunatics and idiots. As some were furious, the usual mode of restraint consisted of passing their hands under their knees, fastening them with manacles, securing their ankles by bolts, passing a chain over all, and lastly attaching them firmly to the bed. "In this state, I can assure the Committee from my own knowledge, they have continued for years, and the result has been that they have so far lost the use of their limbs that they are utterly incapable of rising." The rooms over the cells were appropriated to the sick. * Dublin. Mr. Rice found twentySee postea. LUNATIC SECURED IN A HOLE. 395 four persons lying in one room, some old, some infirm, and in the centre of the room a corpse; one or two were dying. In the adjoining room he found a woman in a state of distraction, the corpse of her child left upon her knees for two days; it was almost putrid. “There was not to be found one attendant who would perform the common duties of humanity. The most atrocious profligacy in another branch of the establishment prevailed." The condition of a lunatic member of a family among the poor is thus graphically described by a member of the Committee which prepared this valuable Report: "There is nothing so shocking as madness in the cabin of the peasant, where the man is out labouring in the fields for his bread, and the care of the woman of the house is scarcely sufficient for the attendance on the children. When a strong man or woman gets the complaint, the only way they have to manage is by making a hole in the floor of the cabin, not high enough for the person to stand up in, with a crib over it to prevent his getting up. The hole is about five feet deep, and they give this wretched being his food there, and there he generally dies. Of all human calamity I know of none equal to this, in the country part of Ireland, which I am acquainted with." In the physician's report of one asylum for 1816, he speaks of the miserable objects who wander over the face of the country, or are inmates of jails and hospitals. Such do not appear to have taken refuge in any Glenna-galt. The first asylum for the insane in Ireland (and the only one before the Richmond Asylum) was that founded. in Dublin by Swift, whose act would probably have been little known or forgotten, but for the familiar lines in which he himself has immortalized it : "He gave the little wealth he had To build a house for fools or mad, No nation needed it so much." This asylum was opened in 1745, the population being then between three and four millions. What really induced the Dean of St. Patrick's to perform this act was the knowledge that there was no charitable asylum for the insane-nothing more; at any rate, I am not aware that he contemplated the introduction of any improved method of treatment, or would have thought that chains were unsuitable means of restraint. It appears that his attention had been called to the need of an asylum by "The Proposal" of Sir William. Fownes. Swift bequeathed the whole of his estate and effects, subject to certain small legacies, to be laid out in the purchase of land for a hospital large enough for the reception of as many idiots and lunatics as the income of the said lands and effects should be sufficient to maintain. From its historical associations I was interested in visiting this asylum some years ago, but there is nothing otherwise of special interest in the institution. Writing in 1861,* the Inspectors of Irish Asylums "Tenth Report of the District, Criminal, and Private Lunatic Asylums in Ireland." ITS UNSATISFACTORY STATE. 397 observe, "Though subject to our inspection, it is not a regularly licensed asylum, being on a charitable foundation. It is unfortunately situated in a most inappropriate locality, and very deficient, from its original construction, in many necessaries." And the Lunacy Inquiry Commission of 1879 observe, "We feel ourselves compelled to state that St. Patrick's Hospital, though possessing an ample endowment, with an accumulated fund in bank of £20,000, and situated in the metropolis, is yet in many respects one of the most defective institutions for the treatment of the insane which we have visited. The patients wash in tubs in the day-rooms, the water having to be carried all through the house, as no supply is laid on; the hospital is not lighted with gas 'for fear of explosion'! and passages nearly four hundred feet long have, on winter evenings, no other light than that which is afforded by three or four small candles." The house was badly warmed, and the ventilation far from satisfactory. .... Further, while the Dean's will did not contemplate the payments of patients, boarders were admitted at an early period, and this policy went to such a length that while in 1800 there were a hundred and six free and only fifty-two paying patients, there were in 1857 eightyeight paying patients, and only sixty-six free. As the Commission naïvely remark, “if the diminution of free patients and the increase of paying patients are to continue, it may one day result that no inmates of Dean Swift's Hospital will be maintained entirely out of his bequest, which certainly does not appear to have been |