I found also that an unnecessary and continued lack of out-door exercise tended to multiply deeds of violence.  Patients were supposed to be taken for a walk at least once a day, and twice, when the weather permitted.  Yet those in the violent ward (and it is they who most need the exercise) usually got out of doors only when the attendants saw fit to take them.  For weeks a ward-mate—­a man sane enough to enjoy freedom, had he had a home to go to—­kept a record of the number of our walks.  It showed that we averaged not more than one or two a week for a period of two months.  This, too, in the face of many pleasant days, which made the close confinement doubly irksome.  The lazy fellows on whose leisure we waited preferred to remain in the ward, playing cards, smoking, and telling their kind of stories.  The attendants needed regular exercise quite as much as the patients and when they failed to employ their energy in this healthful way, they were likely to use it at the expense of the bodily comfort of their helpless charges.

If lack of exercise produced a need of discipline, each disciplinary move, on the other hand, served only to inflame us the more.  Some wild animals can be clubbed into a semblance of obedience, yet it is a treacherous obedience at best, and justly so.  And that is the only kind of obedience into which a man can be clubbed.  To imagine otherwise of a human being, sane or insane, is the very essence of insanity itself.  A temporary leisure may be won for the aggressor, but in the long run he will be put to greater inconvenience than he would be by a more humane method.  It was repression and wilful frustration of reasonable desires which kept me a seeming maniac and made seeming maniacs of others.  Whenever I was released from lock and key and permitted to mingle with the so-called violent patients, I was surprised to find that comparatively few were by nature troublesome or noisy.  A patient, calm in mind and passive in behavior three hundred and sixty days in the year, may, on one of the remaining days, commit some slight transgression, or, more likely, be goaded into one by an attendant or needlessly led into one by a tactless physician.  His indiscretion may consist merely in an unmannerly announcement to the doctor of how lightly the latter is regarded by the patient.  At once he is banished to the violent ward, there to remain for weeks, perhaps indefinitely.

XXII

Like fires and railroad disasters, assaults seemed to come in groups.  Days would pass without a single outbreak.  Then would come a veritable carnival of abuse—­due almost invariably to the attendants’ state of mind, not to an unwonted aggressiveness on the part of the patients.  I can recall as especially noteworthy several instances of atrocious abuse.  Five patients were chronic victims.  Three of them, peculiarly irresponsible, suffered with especial regularity, scarcely a day passing without bringing to them its quota of punishment.  One of these, almost an idiot, and quite too inarticulate to tell a convincing story even under the most favorable conditions, became so cowed that, whenever an attendant passed, he would circle his oppressor as a whipped cur circles a cruel master.  If this avoidance became too marked, the attendant would then and there chastise him for the implied, but unconscious insult.