Diseases of the Nervous System

From the annual^ reports of the Somerset County Asylum for twenty years, mania, recurrent mania, monomania, and puerperal mania included nearly 53^ per cent, of the admissions of mental disorders; previously distinguished in the Journal, as belonging to the second class of cases of insanity. The actual numbers under the above forms of mania were 595 males and 712 females; from ordinary mania, first attack, there weie 374 males and 418 females ; from recurrent or periodic mania, second and more frequent attacks, 174 males and 206 females; the numbers from monomania were 47 males and 41 females, and from puerperal mania 47. The cases were distributed unequally over the different years as regards numbers. In the first year, 1848, upwards of 200 were transferred from licensed houses, in which they had been maintained, to the asylum, and 81 were sent directly from their unions and homes ; so a larger number were admitted in the first ten months than in any succeeding year. In the second year there was a diminution of a third, and in the following seven years the cases of mania averaged only a half, being about 1 instead of 3 in the week. In the following years the average numbers increased about one-fifth, mainly due to the reception of W elsh patients pievious to the opening of the Glamorgan County Asylum in 1865. & b As regards age at the time of admission, the youngest (682) was a boy of 10 % years, who worked in a silk factory at Taunton. Two months pieviously he received a blow over the left parietal bone, and suffered fiom fever; there was a slight swelling at the part, no pain on pressure. Sometimes he was furious and violent towards his family, also incoherent. He turned out to be a very intelligent lad, and at the end of fifteen months left the asylum quite recovered.