is a common feature of public scandal… …Born agitators and professional reformers, who live and move upon the borderland of insanity, who are ever intent upon turning this world upside down, and having things done some other way no matter what the present way be — have appropriated all such suspicion, imputation, accusation and scandal as valuable contribution to their magazine of munitions, to be used in a general crusade against whatever appears to be established. Professed neurologists and flippant neurospasts of the medical profession, arrogating to themselves all knowledge of psychology and psychiatry, have by sneers, innuendo and direct assaults upon the character and qualification of medical officers serving in American hospitals for the insane, done what they could do toward the disparagement of hospital reputation. Hungry politicians of a low order have in notable instances, unscrupulously manufactured and promulgated accusations and reports as testimony against incumbents of hospital places, calculated to disquiet and abuse the public mind respecting the management of those great charities. Foreign hospitals and their methods have been extolled and contrasted as in every respect superior to our own."
M. le Dr Workman, qui a longtemps occupé la situation de surintendant de l’asile de Toronto, dans un article sur le sujet (numéro de Juillet 1881 de l’American Journal of Insanity) disait : — "The pernicious accusations here complained of, rarely, if ever, have their origin among the uneducated portion of the population. They are trumped up by persons professing more intelligence than moral honesty, and they are cherished into pestilant vigor by those who have had but too much education."
Dans un de ses rapports, M. le Dr Rogers de l’asile de l’État d’Indiana, dit : — "Institutions have been assailed in this manner often before, and the results always have been, and always will be, direful, as far at least as regards the general effect on those most interested — the immediate friends of the insane."
Je vais maintenant citer le cas de la Prison de Réforme de l’Île-aux-Noix (1861), pour donner une idée de ce que peuvent faire les préjugés nationaux et religieux, de ce que produit souvent ici la haine qui en découle,
