Annotated and Abridged Artifact
 |
The Moral Treatment Of Insanity
| |||||||||||||
Annotations
1. This describes the main features of moral treatment as first described by William Tuke and Philippe Pinel in Europe. “Morbid trains of thought” suggest depression but also would include anything that would bring about mental illness. Moral treatment sought to replace unhealthy activities and thoughts with what medical professionals considered healthy ones.
2. This passage illustrates the tendency of supporters of moral treatment to favor environments and activities in which order and morality, as defined by the middle-class standards of the time, prevailed.
3. This constituted a class of employees separate from the attendants. It is the beginning of professional therapists, an occupation that did not exist at the time.
4. What constituted “the curable class” changed over time. Many superintendents of insane asylums before the Civil War were quite optimistic about the curability of insanity, but even they excluded from this category those whose disabilities resulted from brain trauma or congenital causes.
5. This new class of employees would make coercion and force less necessary by the fact they would always be seen as friends and companions. Attendants would remain responsible for the exercise of coercive measures.
6. The “we” refers to a very small number of individuals, the superintendents of insane asylums who had formed the first professional medical association in the United States.
7. “Objectionable amusements” would include much of what the American working class was doing in their leisure time. By “rational,” Brigham means amusements that were both orderly and likely to lead to an improvement of the individual’s character.
8. Amariah Brigham was in the midst of a debate with other superintendents about the efficacy of moral treatment and the need for an architectural design of asylum best suited to the accomplishment of its goals. Brigham, as this document indicates, was one the most outspoken advocates of moral treatment and asylums devoted to that regimen.
