ABSTRACT
In 1915, the Sixty-Eighth (and final) Annual Report of the Lunacy Commissioners for England and Wales was published. It provided an ideal occasion for the Commissioners to review the result of the efforts which they had expended during the period from 1847 (the very first year of their existence) until 1914 (the final year). As part of their review exercise they included a graph which illustrated how, throughout the critical period, the number of asylums had increased from twentyone to ninety-seven; how the mean number of inmates per asylum had increased from 261 to 1,088; and how the absolute number of lunatics contained in such asylums had increased from around 5,000 to something approaching 105,000. By any standards they were phenomenal increases and the pattern of augmentation was, as we now know, paralleled in many other parts of the western world-from France and the USA to Germany and Ireland. And as far as Ireland is concerned, this pattern of growth and development has been more than adequately dealt with in Finnane’s (1981) work. I have no intention of summarising that work here, though a graphical representation of patterns of admission and residence relating to the twenty-two Irish asylums which were extant in 1914 is provided in Figure 4.1.
