The mind and its doctors

摘要

On 22 September 1796, 31-year-old Mary Lamb, who had been showing signs of insanity for some days, fell into a frenzy, hurled forks and other objects around the room in which the family dinner was being prepared, and stabbed her mother to death with a case-knife. Her brother Charles, coming home to the havoc, took the knife from her and conveyed her to a private madhouse in Islington. The following day, the Coroner's jury ‘sat on the body’ and, the press reported, ‘of course brought in their verdict, Lunacy’. Mary was treated well in the madhouse—Charles confided that the proprietress and her daughter ‘love her and are taken with her amazingly’—and a few months later was able to come out to a peaceful life in her brother's charge, going back into confinement whenever threatened again by ‘violent agitations’.