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( 94; )
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XV.—A LUNATIC VILLAGE. • BEING AN ACCOUN...
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PART II. {Concluded from p. 33.)
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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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( 94; )
( 94 ; )
Xv.—A Lunatic Village. • Being An Accoun...
XV . —A LUNATIC VILLAGE . BEING AN _ACCOUNT OF A _COEONY OF LUNATICS , LITING _PEEE PROM RESTRAINT , AT GHEEI _, IN BELGIUM .
Part Ii. {Concluded From P. 33.)
PART II . { Concluded from p . 33 . )
In our last article we gave an account of tlie historical rise and rogress of Gheeland also of what may . be termed tlie poetical
p aspect of this little , Belgian town . There is something wonderfully touching in the story of the colony : founded in religious feeling , a
thousand years ago , preserving its peculiar character through the lapse of agesand affording at every turn pathetic romances attached
to each farm , and cottage . It remains for us to state the regulations and the results of Gheel from a scientific point of view , and the
first fact which meets us is that a large number of the insane patients exhibit chronic casesof mania or different forms of
imbecility . So strongly did systems , of coercion _jDrevail all over Europe until late yearsthat little attention was paid to insanity as a curable
. illness ; which name , in its early stages it constantly deserved . Those who lost their reason were shut up to avoid trouble and danger ; and
it was chiefly when hopeless mania or imbecility supervened that Belgian families located their patients at Gheelsimply to be out of
the way . Yet even then it has often been fo , und that the maniac consigned to the peasant ' s care , and no longer confined and worried
by injudicious guardianship , became quiet and amiable , and after some days was hardly to be recognised . Whenas now more
frequently happens , patients recently attacked are sen , t away to Gheel , recoveries are numerous . Of violent inmates it is found that those
located on the farms have a better chance than those placed in the town itselfand they are at all times more easily cured than patients
afflicted with , melancholy . The proportion of cures appears to be increasing . - Dr . Backelwho had passed his life at Gheeltold the
celebrated French physician , Esquirol , that from ten to fifteen , cures were annually effected on from 400 to 500 patients . But during
the last four years , from 1856 to 1860 , the average has shown thirty-six recoveries on about 900 patients . If , however , the
originally incurable cases are set aside , the -proportion of cures is from fifty to sixty-five in every hundred . Again , perfectly
hopeless cases are much softened in intensity , and M . Duval tells us breaking of one young everything g ' irl who she had could been lay confined her hands for a year on in who an when asylum she ,
found herself living freely in a peasant ' s household , , limited , herself to breaking constantly little bits of wood . Unable entirely to
restrain her propensity , she yet seemed to understand that it would be wrong and unkind to destroy the property of poor people who
treated her kindly . It is also found that those who have been long * inmates at Gheel show the greatest interest in new comers ,
particularly when they belong to the country or the neighborhood
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Citation
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English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864), April 1, 1861, page 94, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ewj/issues/ewj_01041861/page/22/
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