No. 439.

        FROM THE SURGEON-GENERAL,

                        INDIAN MEDICAL DEPARTMENT,

        To THE SECRETARY TO THE GOVERNMENT OF BENGAL,

                                                                        JUDICIAL DEPARTMENT.

                                                            Dated Fort William, the 7th July 1875.

SIR,

I HAVE the honor to submit the following report concerning the Asylums for
the insane situated in the province of Bengal for the year 1874.

Alteration of forms
of statistical
returns.

2. Since the submission of my report for the preceding year, the forms in which the
statistical returns of these institutions are rendered have undergone modification under the
orders of the Government of India (Home Department resolution No. 419F, dated 31st
August 1874). As compared with those previously in use, the forms now authorized are less
numerous and less elaborate. The figured statements employed for the illustration of this
report have accordingly undergone a corresponding change.

Abbreviation of
report.

3. In the orders of Government noted in the margin, I have been instructed to condense
the periodical reports submitted by this department, and
prohibited from reproducing in extenso subsidiary reports
submitted by my subordinates. I have therefore in this
report limited myself to questions of administrative im-
portance, reserving for the quinquennial or decennial review, which the orders of Government
sanction, a more detailed and elaborate consideration of matters of general or scientific interest;
embodied in my general report the information supplied by superintendents, and excluded
the returns furnished by individual asylums, incorporating them in the general statements
and tables herewith submitted.

General
numerical results
of asylums.

Transfers.

4. In the following statement the principal statistical events of all the asylums of the
province are shown individually and collectively. It will be observed that the totals of columns
6 and 7E, representing " total population" and 'total discharged," are not a sum of the
subsidiary figures. I have considered it right to exclude from the provincial total of insane
persons treated in and discharged from asylums those who were merely transferred from one
asylum to another. These figures enter properly into the numerical results of individual
asylums, but if included in the general aggregate, they would vitiate the figures of 1874 for the
purpose of comparison with any other year. I have for this reason excluded these transfers,
which were exceptionally numerous in the year 1874, owing to the opening of a new asylum
at Berhampore, from all statements in which numbers representing the aggregate of persons
admitted, discharged, or treated in all the asylums of the province occur. The total of column
10 will also be found not to be an arithmetical total; because the Berhampore asylum having
been open for only a part of the year, its mean population for that period had for the purpose
of a true aggregate to be expanded so as to cover the whole year. In the remarks which I shall
offer below on each asylum, I shall draw attention to any thing unusual in the statistics of
individual institutions. With this explanation, I leave statement No. 1 to speak for itself.