You will find many people nowadays who will tell you that such places are much kinder to "lunatics" like us than they used to be; that treatments of the past were based on quackery and medieval superstition, but the treatments of today are grounded only in the most solid science. We, having experienced them, do not agree; we imagine that a well-intentioned observer of a century ago would have said the same things, and a century hence people will say them still.

Love this. This kind of irony about the writer's time period is one of the things I think historical fiction does best.