BEDLAM ‘PALACE FOR LUNATICS’
“One can hardly imagine a human being in a more degraded and brutalised condition than that in which I found this female.” The woman, Anna Stone, had been found naked, filthy and chained with several others against the wall of a damp, dark stone cell.
This was one of several appalling discoveries made by inspectors at London’s Bethlem ‘madhouse’ in 1814. Although Bethlem Hospital (its official title, although it was more commonly known as Bedlam) was supposed to be the foremost psychiatric institution in Britain, the inspectors thought it had “the appearance of a dog kennel”.
Bethlem was founded in 1247 and through most of its history reflected contemporary views on the treatment and care of people with a mental illness. There was, however, a darker period when the hospital became more conservative, secretive and, eventually, abusive in the treatment of its patients. This lasted for more than a century and, despite later reforms, has led to the permanent association of the term Bedlam with anything that is chaotic or unruly.
For most of its history Bethlem was the only dedicated mental institution in Britain, which automatically made its medical staff the foremost experts in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. Medieval thinking held that madness was a disease of the body, not of the brain, which could be cured using strong medicines to
