4 Aug 1845 Jahr - 1) Lunatics Act 2) Lunatics Act

Beschreibung:

1) 8 & 9 Vic., c. 100

2) 8 & 9 Vic., c. 126

«Seen in the light of previous legislation, the Lunatics Act of 1845 was not a watershed in the process of certification, and can be perceived partly as a consolidation of ’lunacy reform’. It continued, for instance, the tradition of the testimony of a single medical practitioner for pauper patients and that of two medical practitioners for private patients. Although a national Lunacy Commission was created out of the now defunct Metropolitan Lunacy Commission, magistrates retained control over licensed homes in the provinces and the running and visitation of county pauper asylums. In one respect, however, the Lunatics Act (1845) changed the nature of certificates for private patients, by stipulating that ’facts’ had to be given to verify the ’insanity’ of all (non-pauper) persons:

I being a Physician or Surgeon or an Apothecary, duly authorised to practise as such, hereby certify that I have this Day, separately from any other medical practitioner, visited and personally examined A.B. a Person named in the accompanying Statement and Order, and that the said A.B. is a Lunatic [or an insane Person, or an Idiot, or a Person of unsound Mind], and a proper Person to be confined, and that I have formed this Opinion from the following Fact or
Facts; viz.

Signed Name Place of Abode
Dated this Day of One thousand eight hundred and ’

Those patients admitted without certificates or with incomplete certificates were liable to be immediately released; in the case of private homes, the license to receive inmates could be revoked.32 The Asylums Act of 1845 also had a direct impact on the number of people liable to be certified by obliging all counties and boroughs who had not done so, to erect alone, or combine to erect, asylums for their pauper insane within three years of the Act. It also extended certification to any single insane persons kept at a charge. […]
These troubles included confusion over whether those already in licensed institutions needed to be certified, whether certificates of insanity were needed for pauper lunatics admitted to workhouses, whether certification continued to be applied only to ’dangerous’ lunatics, and whether patients transferred from one
asylum to
another needed to be (re) certified» (Wright, 1998, p. 275).

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