The rest of the madwomen seemed to
understand the joke perfectly (not only in this case, but in all
the others, except their own), and be highly amused by it. The
nature of their several kinds of insanity was made known to me in
the same way, and we left each of them in high good humour. Not
only is a thorough confidence established, by those means, between
the physician and patient, in respect of the nature and extent of
their hallucinations, but it is easy to understand that
opportunities are afforded for seizing any moment of reason, to
startle them by placing their own delusion before them in its most
incongruous and ridiculous light.
Every patient in this asylum sits down to dinner every day with a
knife and fork; and in the midst of them sits the gentleman, whose
manner of dealing with his charges, I have just described. At
every meal, moral influence alone restrains the more violent among
them from cutting the throats of the rest; but the effect of that
influence is reduced to an absolute certainty, and is found, even
as a means of restraint, to say nothing of it as a means of cure, a
hundred times more efficacious than all the strait-waistcoats,
fetters, and handcuffs, that ignorance, prejudice, and cruelty have
manufactured since the creation of the world.
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