On the Construction of Public Lunatic Asylums

Abstract

Among not a few less agreeable influences pervading lunatic asylums, there is one under whose effect every person concerned in the general management of those institutions is sure to come, viz., the architectural. No asylum superintendent is to be found, who has not various plans of renovation and improvement for his own institution, who does not see precisely the constructional arrangements which the insane require, and who has not, very generally, floating before his mental vision, asleep or awake, some grand scheme for a model asylum. Nor is this to be wondered at, when it is considered that the asylum building is the machine through and by which the superintendent is to work out and develope his system of moral management; that, in short, it is an instrument of cure, of the adequacy, utility, and perfectness of which he must be the best judge.