ABSTRACT
In March 1881 the Guardians of Exeter's Corporation of the Poor gathered at a Special Court session to watch J.B. Parker's exhibition of a Revolving Bed designed for the treatment of lunatics. Parker explained the value of the device in changing the position of the patient and ‘also in restraining violent lunatics by means of a network of cord’. On being placed under such restraint the lunatic ‘might be mesmerised and that from 80 to 90 per cent might be cured by such means’. The Guardians were sufficiently impressed to appoint a small committee to offer Parker an opportunity to prove his assertion of the curative powers of mesmerism. This interest was expressed long after mechanical restraints had been discredited and 20 years after the Exeter authorities had been sternly advised by the national Lunacy Commissioners in 1861 of the dangers of engaging in such experiments without the approval and guidance of physicians. 1 The Guardians’ readiness to open their door to such medical entrepreneurs is to be explained in part by the formidable pressures on them to deal with pauper lunatics throughout Devon. As the asylums built in the 1840s had filled to overflowing by the early 1880s, the Lunacy Commissioners pressed boroughs such as Exeter and Plymouth to provide their own amenities. 2 Having no automatic right of access to the County Asylum, Exeter's Guardians were making use of Dr Finch's establishment at Fisherton House, where 87 Exeter paupers were being held in early 1882. 3 By the 1880s Exminster had become the target of severe criticism from the Lunacy Commission, its superintendent, George Saunders complaining bitterly of the way he was treated by the London Commissioners and those who visited his institution during these years. At the close of the decade it was clear that overcrowding at Exminster was reaching crisis proportions and the breakdown in relations between the asylum and the London authorities was to overshadow the attempts of the institution to expand in the following years. 4
