The nurse is by her side in an instant with words half soothing, half stern. A messenger comes in haste from the asylum to ask us not to stop. Strangers may not linger where the patients pass. It is apt to excite them. As we go in with him the human file is passing yet, quiet restored. The troubled voice of the unseen singer still gropes vainly among the lost memories of the past for the missing key: "Oh! how my heart grows weary, far from"
"Who is she, doctor?"
"Hopeless case. She will never see home again."
An average of seventeen hundred women this asylum harbors; the asylum for men up on Ward's Island even more. Altogether 1,419 patients were admitted to the city asylums for the insane in 1889, and at the end of the year 4,913 remained in them. There is a constant ominous increase in this class of helpless unfortunates that are thrown on the city's charity. Quite two hundred are added year by year, and the asylums were long since so overcrowded that a great "farm" had to be established on Long Island to receive the surplus. The strain of our hurried, over-worked life has something to do with this. Poverty has more. For these are all of the poor. It is the harvest of sixty and a hundred-fold, the "fearful rolling up and rolling down from generation to generation, through all the ages, of the weakness, vice, and moral darkness of the past."[1] The curse of the island haunts all that come once within its reach. "No man or woman," says Dr. Louis L. Seaman, who speaks from many years' experience in a position that gave him full opportunity to observe the
- ↑ Dr. Louis L. Seaman, late chief of staff of the Blackwell's Island hospitals: "Social Waste of a Great City," read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1886.
