In this inquiry all the asylums of Scotland are regarded as one asylum, and the different institutions merely as different wards of the asylum. A patient transferred from one institution to another is thus regarded as never leaving the asylum, but merely as passing from one ward to another. The words - the asylum - therefore, in this paper, mean an asylum made up of all the asylums of Scotland.The inquiry does not deal with the whole population of the asylum. It deals only with the patients who were admitted into it during some single and remote year, and who had never been under asylum treatment before - in other words, who were admitted during the year in question for the first time.
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