Insanity.  History.—­The earliest reference to insanity is found in the book of Deuteronomy.  Another reference is in Samuel where it speaks concerning David’s cunning and successful feigning of insanity.  “And he changed his behavior before them and feigned himself mad in their hands, and scrabbled on the door-posts of the gate, and let his spittle fall down upon his beard,” Feigning insanity under distressing circumstances has been one of man’s achievements throughout the centuries.  It is spoken of in Ecclesiastes.  Jeremiah says in regard to the wine cup:  “And they shall drink and be moved and be mad.”  Nations also were poisoned by the wine cup, for Jeremiah says, “Babylon has been a golden cup in the Lord’s hands, that made all the earth drunken.  The nations have drunken of her wine, therefore the nations are mad.”  Greek writers speak of cases of mental unsoundness as occurring with some frequency in Greece.  The inhabitants of the Roman Empire were afflicted with mental unsoundness and Nero was considered crazy.  In ancient Egypt there were temples and priests for the care of the insane.

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Hippocrates, who lived four hundred years before Christ, was the first physician who seemed to have any true conception of the real nature of insanity.  For many centuries later the masses believed that madness was simply a visitation of the devil.  The insane, in the time of Christ, were permitted to wander at large among the woods and caves of Palestine.  The monks built the first hospital or asylum for the insane six centuries after Christ.

A hospital for the insane was established at Valencia in Spain in 1409.  In 1547 the hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem was established near London and was known as “Bedlam” for a long time.

The first asylum to be run upon reform principles was St. Luke’s of London, founded in 1751.  About 1791 Samuel Hahnemann established an asylum for the insane at Georgenthal, near Gotha, and the law of kindness was the unvarying rule in the institution.  Hahnemann says in his Lesser Writings:  “I never allow any insane persons to be punished by blows or other corporeal inflictions.”  Pineli struck the chains from the incarcerated insane at the Bicetre, near Paris in 1792 or 1793.

There has been a gradual tendency during the last century toward better things in the behalf of the insane.  A hundred years ago they were treated with prison surroundings and prison fare.  Then asylum treatment began to prevail.  This means close confinement, good food, sufficient clothing and comfortable beds.  Asylum care means the humane custody of dangerous prisoners.  “From the asylum we move on to the hospital system of caring for the insane and this system recognizes the fact that the lunatic is a sick man and needs nursing and medical treatment in order to be cured.  Hospital treatment has been gradually introduced during the past thirty years or more,” and in time it will eventually supercede asylum treatment and prison or workhouse methods in the management of the insane everywhere.