man in chains

I was rounding in the female ward this week when a man wandered in and
began singing a few hymns on the ward. It not being the usual visiting
hours, I was curious as to what he was doing there, but as the hymns
weren't particularly boisterous (no Onward, Christian Soldiers here) and
he left after just one song, I didn't really follow it up. Talking with
some of the other staff later in the day, I learned that he was one of
the locally known mentally disturbed patients that lives in the nearby
community. What's more, I was surprised to learn that he lives his life
with a manacle around his left leg. John, one of our docs here at the
hospital, assumed this was some sort of dramatic oversight and sent him
to the workshop to have it removed, but as it turns out, like Jacob
Marley he's condemned to live his life with a shackle around his leg
because the family refuses to have it taken off. They say that when he
gets more unbalanced, they need to be able to chain him up to one of the
trees in their front yard, where he is left for a few days until he
comes back to his senses. This rather byzantine arrangement is by no
means uncommon in the area, where people who are delusional or mentally
ill are routinely labeled as possessed by demons and locked away until
they 'get over it', at least for a little while.