The New Metropolitan Asylums

Abstract

In June, 1867, a new era was begun in the Poor Law system by Mr. Gathorne Hardy's Bill, which comprised arrangements for meeting the epidemic requirements of London, and for relieving the workhouses and lunatic asylums of the imbecile, idiotic, and chronic patients, not dangerous or destructive, but quiet in their habits, leaving behind merely the infirm poor and the acute and violent lunatics, for whom the accommodation was thought sufficient. There was also another clause providing a bevy of dispensaries, which however has not been carried out, though it was probably one of the most promising parts of the Bill. As regards the arrangements for epidemics, recent events have shown them to be inadequate; it must be said, however, that in 1867 the idea of meeting visitations of severe epidemics by temporary structures was not even in its infancy, otherwise we might have been spared such structures as Stockwell and Homerton Hospitals, which will never be filled or even half-filled in times of ordinary public health, and which are too small for great emergencies. A rapidly expansive system, as by temporary hospitals or by tents, capable of enlargement and of folding up and packing away when done with, is the proper plan for treating epidemics. What then is the proper one for quiet lunatics and imbeciles ?