From the same grounds likewise follow the economical advantages of distinct sections; for the more expensive building arrangements required for acute cases need not be repeated in the section for quiet, orderly, chronic, or for convalescent patients, where accommodation may be beneficially made to accord as nearly as possible with that of their cottage homes. If detached sections were adopted, the elaborate, complicated and costly systems of warming and ventilation would not be needed; there would be less to cherish the feeling of imprisonment; and, lastly, to recal the valuable observation of the Commissioners before quoted (p. 142), this species of separate residence would be a means of treatment "of the utmost importance, constituting in fact a probationary system," and a most excellent addition to the means of 'moral treatment' now in operation. There is one subsidiary recommendation made by the Lunacy Commissioners, which we cannot so freely subscribe to, that, viz. of classifying the patients in sections according to their occupations. Those of the same trade or employment must, as a matter of course, be associated together, during the hours of labour; but at the expiration of those hours we would wish to see that association broken up. The congregation of the same mentally disordered persons always together is not desirable; the insane are selfish enough--absorbed in self, from the effects of their malady; and it should always be a point in treatment, to disturb this condition, to arouse the attention to others, and to other things; an effort which would be the more difficult in a small knot of people always accustomed to meet together, knowing each other's ways and whims, and each thinking the other mad, though not himself. Again, if the workers are entirely separated from the drones in the hive, the latter are likely to remain drones still: they lose the benefit of example, which operates, as among children, so strongly with the insane.
To apply these observations to one class of workers, for example, to the laundresses: it seems to us scarcely merciful to keep these poor patients to the wash-tub all day; at the close of their labour to turn them into an adjoining room, and at night consign them to sleep over it. Instead of being thus scarcely allowed to escape the sphere and atmosphere of their toil, they should have their condition varied as far as possible, be brought into new scenes, mixed with others who have been otherwise engaged, and made to feel themselves patients in an asylum, and not washer-women. Is it, in short, not a radical error in the direction of an asylum, to place the inmates in such a position and under such circumstances, as to make them feel themselves workmen under compulsion, regularly employed, dealt with only as labourers and artisans, by being kept all day in their workshops, and in the evening and night brought together, because they are workers, and unlike the other residents of the asylum, who will in their opinion come to be regarded, as unlike themselves,--as the fitting occupants, and the only patients? Treated apart in the manner under notice, there would be nothing in the position or circumstances around the industrious inmate to suggest to him that he was a patient, except in name, as called so by the officials. We are, therefore, opposed to this _industrial system_ of classification, and regard medical classification as the only proper one.