Medicine and Restraint
Moral treatment began as a humanitarian effort to reduce the brutalities faced by the mentally ill. This meant limiting the use of mechanical restraints like chains and adopting progressive medicine. As the nineteenth century wore on, many moral therapists began to theoretically reject the use of restraints entirely. Despite their desire to rely on the structured environment to restrain and heal, reality made it impossible for the moral asylum to dispel the use of medicine and restraint. Because of this, physicians set specific guidelines concerning when restraints could be used and who had they authority to place them on patients. The detailed treatises on medical treatment and physical control indicate that a pure moral asylum never existed in America despite physician's best efforts.