| Description Of Item | From the collection of Thomas Laycock. Article is titled ‘On the Administration of Food to Fasting Patients’ by James Wilkes, M.R.C.S., Medical Superintendent of the Stafford County Lunatic Asylum. Published in The Asylum Journal, Volume 1, Issue 11, February 1855, pages 168-169.
Wilkes writes in response to the ‘interesting remarks in the last number of the Asylum Journal, by Dr Manley, on prolonged fasting and the refusal of food by insane patients,’ in which Manley had advocated for ‘the introduction of food’ to patients ‘‘by means of any ordinary funnel’ rather than by stomach pump.’ Wilkes offers an alternative device that had ‘been long in use in some of the Scotch asylums’ which introduced food into the patient through a tube designed to be placed in the nasal cavities, rather than through the mouth.
Wilkes describes the apparatus he uses as consisting of ‘a long flexible tube, rather less than a quarter inch in diameter […] and which is attached to an oval metal case, containing the syringe, and holding in it more than a pint of fluid. The one I use was made by Messrs. Hilliard and Chapman, of Glasgow,’. Wilkes states that feeding the tubes through the nose causes irritation to the patient, and so he prefers to introduce it through the mouth. He states that although ‘a prejudice exists in the minds of some high authorities against the use of the ordinary stomach pump […] With the small tube, however, I have never experienced the least difficulty […] and I believe that, where compulsory measures are unavoidable, instead of being a painful or unjustifiable process, it is the most humane and least distressing to the patient […].’
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