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INSANITY AMONG- WOMEN. . 147
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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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In Directing His Attention To The Import...
twenty and thirty- _^—that during * which , probably , tlie largestmiraber of first attacks of mental disease happen—we find tliat the
preponderance of females is at its maximum , namely , 9 * 8 per cent . If , thereforethe relative liability of the sexes to insanity were equal ,
, the absolute number of insane women would necessarily exceed that of the insane men .
Again , it must be remembered that the numbers which compose two classes of insane persons at a certain date , do not accurately
represent the numbers who in each class become insane , which is what we -want to ascertain . We may familiarly illustrate this
' important there were distinction 1000 subscribers hy supposing to the that _English on the 1 Woman st of January ' s Jouh , : 1860 _in a : l , ,
500 of whom were _jDatients in hospitals , and 500 were persons in the enjoyment of good health . _SujDpose further , that the same
proportion held good in 1870 . The number of subscribers would appear to be equal , and would actually be so at these dates ; but
the number of persons who during the ten years had been subscribers might have been widely different . Very many of those who
in the hospitals had subscribed _woiild have died , and others supplied their places , while among those not in hospitals there might
have been few fresh subscribers . When we apply this obvious _j _^ rinciple to the present subjectand askHow many men in a certain
, , period of time become insane , and how many women ? we naturally inquire whether the mortality in asylums is greater in one sex
than in the other . The reply to this question is , that in asylums many more men die than women , and that _conseqiiently the number
of women accumulate . Hence , at any particular date , as the 1 st of January , 1860 , the number of females in asylums ( both absolutely
and in proportion to the population ) may have been larger than the maleswithout more women becoming insane than men . At the
York , _Ketreat the annual mortality from 1796 to 1860 was 6-06 per 100 males resident in the institutionand only 4 * 46 per 100
, females resident . It would therefore follow that the proportion of female * deaths to male deaths was as 100 to 135 , or , in other words ,
thirty-five per cent , more men than women died . In many other institutions for the insane the excess is much greater , even double ,
but for the present purpose it is sufficient to adduce the experience of the Retreat to show how certainly it must hax 3 pen that at any
given period the females in an asylum will , by reason of their low mortalityexceed the maleswithout more females having been
admitted , , ( that is attacked with , insanity , ) whether we have regard to their number absolutely or in proportion to their excess in the
general population . Dr . Jarvis , of Massachusetts , has prepared tables showing the relative number of -admissions of patients of
* Or , if we take that between thirty and forty , when attacks of insanity oc I have cur more calculated freque these ntly , according fifrom to so a table me statisti of the cs , numbers the excess living is still at each 5 _*/> .
ii 9 ; e given in the Statistical gures Journal _^ by , J " . J " . Fox , M . & . C . S . . ¦ _M- 2
Insanity Among- Women. . 147
INSANITY AMONG- WOMEN . . 147
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Citation
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English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864), May 1, 1861, page 147, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ewj/issues/ewj_01051861/page/3/
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