#I just think WE do tend to terribly understimate society in past times

[nowlander]

So... Doctors started questioning practices like the ones in Seward's asylum by the end of the 18th century, thought it was not until the 1830s that asylums started banishing physical restraint. A great influence to this action to be finally taken was a patient dying from strangulation after being strapped to his bed in a straightjacket and left overnight without supervision, in 1829.

However, with asylums becoming decent places to live (meals, roof, no physical abuse), the government sent more people there (homeless and the like), and then it became "too expensive" to give the increasing asylum population basic human rights. To reduce costs, asylums became understaffed, and eventually physical restraints came back to help the staff "care for" larger quantities of patients.

So it is sadly true that asylums resembled Jack's by the time the novel was published (1897). Nevertheless, doctors weren't happy about it, (neither the general public); it was basically bigwigs' doing to reduce costs.

So yeah, Jack Seward might be a product of an austere time, but he wasn't acting on orders and lamenting asylums' decline like other doctors of the time, he actually seems pretty content with exercing such control over his patients.

And Lucy, being general public by no means should have call him "of modern ideas".

After reading some History, he's not what I would expect from a doctor. He should have been recording complaints about the lack of resources and how understaffed/overpopulated the asylum was, not contemplating using Renfield as a living experiment!

My primary source.

Shotout to @monstercollection for bringing this to tumblr attention

When Dracula Daily started, I saw so many posts about this guy who owns an asylum and how bad he is. Like I thought he was straight up going to cut someone up or do drug experiments that kill or damages a person with all the TW posts I saw. Instead, its this nerdy boy who follows his old professor around like a puppy listening to corn metaphors and putting on his Brave Face (TM) to be one of the boys. He wants to help his cool new friend Mrs.Mina so they can talk nerdy theories! (not to say how he does treatment or anything with his patience's are correct or healthy, just saying I was expecting the worst of the worst. What he does is what I expect from that time period tbh.)