A young married woman [age 25] who had been insane eighteen months and whose malady ensued on protracted nursing, probably together with semi-starvation, was brought to us tied up in complicated restraints, although she was greatly emaciated, and so feeble as literally to be unable to walk. Her wrists were wounded and her ankles ulcerated with the restraints she had worn; and her toes were in an actual state of mortification. She appeared frightened, and her expression fo countenance was wild and haggard. Altogether she looked as if merely sent to the asylum to end her miserable life.

What treatment did she receive?
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

She was, of course, at once liberated from her restraints; and with the great care bestowed upon her, she began in a few weeks to recover the power of moving about, and her general aspect became less wretched. For several weeks afterward she was wild, and disposed to be mischievous, although perfectly harmless. Good food, wine, liberty, fresh air, and the sense of having kind people about her, wrought wonderful effects. She became stout, healthy, and gradually quite reasonable. Two of her toes were lost; but her life was saved.
 

John Conolly, Treatment of the Insane without Mechanical Restraints, first published in 1856, [1973, London] p.119
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A revolution had occurred in British medical practice between the early 1830s and the 1850s. Therapeutics largely underwent a reversal from the practice of depletion using bloodletting and purgatives to stimulation with alcohol and nourishment; the brandy bottle replaced the lancet. …In the aftermath of this revolution, alcohol became, for many physicians, a panacea for acute diseases, reaching the zenith of therapeutic fashion in the late 1850s and 1860s.

John Harley Warner, "Physiological Theory and Therapeutic Explanation in the 1860s: The British Debate on the Medical Use of Alcohol," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 549[1980]236
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

…evils [of the old system of treatment by restraint] were not imaginary, but real and dreadful…In the gloomy mansions in which hands and feet were daily bound with straps or chains, and wherein chairs of restraint, and baths of surprise, and even whirling chairs were tolerated, all was consistently bad. The patients were a defenceless flock, at the mercy of men and women who were habitually severe, often cruel, and sometimes brutal…Cold apartments, beds of straw, meagre diet, scanty clothing, scanty bedding, darkness, pestilent air, sickness and suffering, and medical neglect-- all these were common; and they must remain common, however disguised, wherever the system of restraint remains…

John Conolly, The Treatment of the Insane without Mechanical Restrants, 1856, in Ida Macalpine and Richard
Hunter, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, [New York, 1982] p.1034
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

…the mere abolition of fetters and restraints constitutes only a part of what is properly called the non-restraint system. Accepted in its full and true sense, it is a complete system of management of insane patients, of which the operation begins the moment a patient is admitted over the threshold of an asylum…It is a  part of the non-restraint system to remember, whatever the state and circumstances of a newly admitted patient may be, that he comes to the asylum to be cured, or, if incurable, to be protected and taken care of, and kept out of mischief, and tranquillized; and that the strait-waistcoat effects none of these objects.

John Conolly, The Treatment of the Insane without Mechanical Restrants, 1856, in Ida Macalpine and Richard
Hunter, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, [New York, 1982] p.1034-5