Initially the policy hoped to draw in family members to visit their loved ones. Unfortunately, wealthy Londoners often paid money to roam the halls of Bedlam, taking in the zoo-like conditions and marveling at the psychosis around them. Thankfully, times change. The Bethlem Royal Hospital has long since renounced the dark practices of the past and today its staff works day and night to care for those who cannot help themselves.
There's even a museum that exhibits the artwork created by the facility's patients. News U. Politics Joe Biden Congress Extremism. Special Projects Highline. HuffPost Personal Video Horoscopes. Follow Us. Although it is sometimes thought to have treated its patients cruelly, most were free to walk around the grounds, and conditions were not much worse than the average home of the period.
In , the hospital's governors decided that the institution should move a few hundred metres to the west to Moorfields, with the area's open space thought to be healthier than its original premises.
A final move came in when the hospital relocated to the suburb of Bromley - it is now run by the NHS and is considered to be a leading psychiatric hospital. A treatment, invented by Erasmus Darwin - grandfather to Charles - called rotational therapy involved putting a patient in a chair suspended in the air and then spun round for a few hours. In the 18th and 19th centuries patients were dunked in cold baths, starved and beaten.
During this brutal period a Quaker philanthropist Edward Wakefield visited Bethlem in and described naked, starved men chained to walls. A notorious aspect of Bethlem was its availability to public. Wealthy patrons would often pay a shilling to gawp at the unfortunately souls locked in the asylum. Edward Oxford pictured was armed with a gun and fired twice at Queen Victoria in He denied wanting to harm the King and was later declared unfit to plead by reason of insanity and ended up in Bethlem Royal Hospital.
He was armed with a gun and fired twice - both missed both times. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to Bedlam. Richard Dadd: The famous artist, born in Chatham, Kent, in , became convinced his father was the Devil so stabbed him to death and travelled to France. He admitted killing his father after arriving back in England and was sent to the criminal department of Bedlam.
Jonathan Martin: He was an arsonist and was known for setting fire to York Minster in A jury convicted him on a capital charge - which should have resulted in the death penalty.
However, the judge cleared him on the grounds of insanity and he was locked up in Bedlam - where he died nine years later. She approached the King in London while holding a dessert knife and made two lunges at his chest. She was apprehended and was declared insane and sent to Bedlam - where she later died.
At the heart of patient care was a clean, calm environment. It is from their writings that we get a glimpse at what conditions inside Bethlem were like for visitors and patients. The account of diarist Ned Ward is typical.
He visited Bethlem in and found himself immersed in a terrifying world of noise and disorder. With the patients locked in their cells, Ward was able to join other visitors in making taunts and jeers through the bars and peepholes. Some inmates were verbally insulted while others were goaded into doing or saying ridiculous things. However, 18th-century medicine dictated that madness robbed the individual of shame, emotion and reason to the extent that any verbal or physical abuse they suffered could surely have no lasting effect.
It was not just tourists who were drawn to Bethlem. Intermixed with the cacophony, smells and sights of the wards were prostitutes, pickpockets and merchants of food, drink, trinkets and other wares. Despite this, Londoners loved it. Year on year visitor numbers increased, leading to overcrowding, especially during the Christmas and Easter periods.
From , to limit riotous behaviour by both visitors and patients during seasonal holidays, admission was gradually tightened; by the s, outside access was only possible if accompanied by a hospital governor or senior officer.
But it also had an unexpected downside. Public admission allowed anyone to come and make their own judgement on the conditions inside Bethlem. After the ban, the hospital operated behind closed doors with its facilities, care and medical practices operating unobserved and unregulated.
Bethlem soon found itself at the centre of a major financial embezzlement which, together with a general drop in income, placed it in debt. The state of the building, which had been hastily erected in just over two years, was also of concern. It had always suffered from being damp and cold, but increased instances of subsidence and leakage led to a surveyor declaring the edifice to be falling apart.
Violence was commonplace and so many patients were chained either to their beds or to the walls. It looked over formal gardens with tree-lined promenades. And it was a kind of civic pride, and it was a sense of charitable mission: that this was going to make London a grander and better place for everybody. For the first time, meanwhile, private asylums were opening up in the city.
The interior and reality of the hospital, though, was altogether different. Whenever it rained, the walls ran with water. The new hospital was, quite literally, putting a pretty face on what many Londoners saw as a messy, distasteful problem. The hospital may have looked like a palace, but treatment of patients was hardly ideal, as shown in this etching of William Norris in Credit: Wellcome Library, London.
So the sane were mad, and the mad were sane. In those days there was nothing odd about permitting or encouraging such a spectacle: all the world was a stage and visiting Bethlem was regarded as edifying for the same reasons as attending hangings.
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