Statistics in all lands giving the numbers committed to insane hospitals show on their face a great increase, but so many factors enter into these statistics that their value is uncertain.
There is now an ever-increasing provision for the care of the insane.
Owing to the recognition of insanity as a part of nervous disease and its separation from criminality there is no longer the same attempt to conceal it as was formerly the case, and hospitals for the insane are no longer associated with ideas of Bedlam.

It is generally believed that modern conditions in the hurry and excitement of life, and the extreme social differences, the greater urban life, the greater extension of factory life, all tend to an increase in insanity, but there is no absolute proof that this is true.

We know very little about insanity in the Middle Ages, but the conditions then were not conducive to a quiet life.

There prevailed then as now excess and want, luxury and poverty, enjoyment and deprivations, balls and dinner parties and other features of the social game.

There were factions in the cities, public executions, not infrequent sieges, scenes of horror, epidemics, famines, and all these combined with religious superstition and the often unjust and cruel laws should have been factors for insanity.