Lady physicians had charge of the female
lunatic asylum with the same authority as the men. The two asylums were
located in the center of a fine tract of farming land in the Southern
part of Eurasia, consisting of ninety-two thousand one hundred and sixty
acres in a high state of cultivation with flourishing orchards and
vineyards, and at the time I visited it had a population of sixty
thousand male inmates and thirty-five thousand female inmates-besides
the officers and guards.
The mildest and most tractable of the inmates were in communities
organized in military style in different parts of the grounds and were
busily employed in doing everything that was required to make the
institution self-stustaining. The physicians of the State prisons were
required by law after one year's imprisonment (one year after sentence
was passed was allowed to prove innocence) to castrate all males
convicted of rape, incest, or any other infamous crime against nature,
and to castrate every male prisoner who committed sodomy or other
infamous crime while in prison; but only after trial and conviction for
the crime before the District Court, and they could by a majority vote
chloroform any dangerous criminal that showed homicidal tendencies.
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