The Lunacy Certificate and the Liberty of the Subject

WHEN the lunacy certificate was first instituted in 1819, the chief motive of those who prescribed its form was to safeguard the liberty of the subject. The scandals of the madhouses of that time had become notorious, and it was well known that sane persons were detained in them who were obnoxious to their relatives from one cause or another. The last great reform of the lunacy laws in 1890 proceeded from the same motive, of safeguarding the liberty of the subject. The event that provoked that law was a series of trials at law instituted in the early eighties. The trials were causes celebres. They lasted many days each. They absorbed the attention of the newspapers and the public, and they were followed by a clamorous outcry for the reform of the lunacy law, which resulted in the reforming and codifying Act of 1890. The reform has been on the whole decidedly beneficial, but the clamour which brought it into existence was utterly unreasonable. Since those days a remarkable change has taken place in public sentiment on this subject. The difficulty now is not to get people under control who need control, but to preserve some modicum of liberty. We are inspected and reported upon in everything we do. The character of our amusements is settled for us, the conditions under which we may and may not do our work in workshops and factories and shops, and even on the