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experiment: to abolish also the strait waistcoat and all mechanical restraints whatever, was an extension of the experiment. This trial was first made at the Lincoln Asylum. Under the directions of Dr Charlesworth the various instruments of coercion were, in the course of years, one by one discontinued, until in 1837, when Mr Gardiner Hill was house-surgeon, the last mechanical restraints were wholly abolished.
In June 1839 Dr Conolly was appointed resident physician at Hanwell. In September he had abolished all the mechanical restraints. The exexperiment was a trying one, for this great asylum contained eight hundred patients. But the experiment was successful; and continued experience proved incontestably, that, in a well ordered asylum, the use even of the strait waistcoat might be entirely discarded. Dr Conolly went further than this. He maintained, that such restraints are in all cases positively injurious, that their use is utterly inconsistent with a good system of treatment; and that, on the contrary, the absence of all such restraints is naturally and necessarily associated with treatment such as that of lunatics
