ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to portray a general picture of hospital provisions for the subnormal in the hope that this will provide the reader with a background against which the research data can be examined. In 1965 the average daily number of beds occupied by the mentally subnormal accounted for approximately 14 per cent of the total daily number of occupied beds in the hospital service as a whole. Prior to 1948 subnormality hospitals were governed by the legal provisions of the Lunacy and Mental Treatment Acts, and the Mental Deficiency Acts. Authority was vested in the Visiting Committee appointed by the Local Authority. The Hospital Management Committees could be appointed to include general or mental hospitals as well as mental subnormality ones, or alternatively each hospital could have its own individual Committee. The Ministry of Health Annual Reports set out the average national weekly cost of maintaining in-patients in various types of hospital.
