Having been invited by our indefatigable Secretary to give a contribution to the present meeting, and having been recently engaged in looking over the earlier records of the Old Asylum of Dundee, it occurred to me that a few remarks on the early history of this institution and the means then in use in the treatment of the patients might not prove uninteresting, as the Asylum was erected at a very important period in the history of psychological medicine, namely, that period when it had dawned on the public mind that harshness and chains were not the proper remedies for the insane, but that much might be done in the treatment of this affliction by kindness, gentleness, and especially by healthy occupation.

(1) The Universal Symptomatology of an Epileptic Fit owing to discharge beginning in some part of the highest cerebral centres.—There is but little doubt that in a severe epileptic paroxysm (“genuine epilepsy”) there are effects, although very crude ones, produced in, or referred to, all parts of the body, animal and organic. Speaking figuratively, there is an endeavour to develop activity of all parts of the body excessively, and of all of them at once, and as rapidly as possible.

Among the descriptions which have appeared from time to time in the “Journal of Mental Science” of buildings arranged for the treatment of the insane, I have not observed any which show details of a building, in connection with an asylum, set apart for cases of infectious disease.

In the classification of the different forms of insanity, it has been agreed to distinguish two chief groups—the first including those recent and curable psychoses, to which the term diseased process is of a truth applicable—the second including those incurable cases which have run their course, and which, indeed, scarcely merit the term diseased process, representing rather, as they do, permanent vices, the results of past disease. Since, in the first group, the psychoses affect principally the emotional and psycho-motor elements of the nervous system, the diseases belonging to this category have been described as of the character or temper (in its older sense) as against diseases of the intellect, which constitute the second category—these latter being marked chiefly by failure of the intellectual powers.

It is not my purpose to discuss in detail hospital organization and construction, but simply to call attention to some defects in both, which, I think, ought to be carefully pondered by those who have an interest in the care and treatment of the insane. My observations are intended to apply, for the most part, to those hospitals mainly devoted to the treatment of recent cases of insanity, and where no considerable number of incurable cases is allowed to accumulate. But with some slight modifications they apply with equal force to all hospitals and asylums for the insane.