Introduction

In their respective published annual reports, the management of both asylums recorded the recovery rates and deaths of their patients as these provided tangible evidence of the effectiveness of the asylums' therapeutic regime. Many reasons were offered to explain disappointing results. The huge numbers of admissions to county asylums in the nineteenth century placed a considerable administrative and financial burden on these institutions. In previous chapters, it has been shown that at Brookwood the management was initially unprepared for the huge demand for places from the county's, workhouses, and that some work-house patients arrived in appalling physical and mental condition. The result was a ‘residual’ asylum population, which has led to the suggestion that any ‘curative ideals’ were restricted to the early years of the nineteenth century when the medical superintendents had the time to experiment with a variety of therapeutics. This argument, however, simplifies the later nineteenth-century asylum therapeutic response and minimizes the continued efforts made by doctors to restore their patients to ‘normality’ within financial and practical constraints. Melling and Forsythe argue that statistics – i.e. patient admissions, length of stay and reason for discharge – provide recovery rates that may assist an understanding of the impact of treatment. On the assumption that one of the primary aims of the nineteenth-century asylum was to cure its patients, one might agree with the management boards of both institutions, that recovery and death rates were reasonable indicators of success.