British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review (Volume 33) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Eetiew IV. 1. Seventeenth Report of (lie Commissioners in Lunacy to the Lord Chancellor. Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, 9th June, 1863.?pp. 176. 2. Fifth Annual Report of the General Board of Commissioners in Lunacy for Scotland. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of her Majesty, 1863.?pp. 226. These annual blue-books present the usual particulars respecting the doings of the Commissioners, the condition of the asylums for the insane (public and private), and the statistics of lunacy. As on former occasions, we have again to remark on the greater value and completeness of the Report issued by the Scottish Commissioners. The English board appear wedded to their old style, and fail in presenting nearly so full an account of the state of lunacy in this country as their fellow- Commissioners do for Scotland. For example, we have no complete statistics of the number of the insane in this country prepared by the Lunacy Board?a fact that has been overlooked by some writers who have not been at the pains of accurately comparing the official returns made in each country respectively. To this the Scotch Commissioners allude in their last Report: " An erroneous estimate," they say, " has been formed of the prevalence of insanity in Scotland, by instituting comparisons between the number of the insane in England and Scotland, founded on the official returns of the English and Scotch Boards of Lunacy. But, in making these comparisons, it has been overlooked that in the English returns no account is taken of private lunatics, resident with friends and boarded with strangers, who have not been reported to the Commissioners. In our former Reports, we estimated the number of this class in Scotland at 1SS7. We see no reason to doubt that if similar i...