Between brushstroke and brushstroke, Richard Dadd (Victorian painter) conceived the disturbing idea that his father was the reincarnation of a devil. During a summer walk through the countryside in 1843 he stabbed him to death. He ran away. Shortly after, the police arrested him in France.
Fed up with claiming without anyone paying the slightest attention that he, in reality, was Saint Paul, at the beginning of 1790 John Frith He tried to attack King George III of England with a stone.
The last drop of energy left in the veins of Eliza Josolyne It froze in the winter of 1857. The only servant in a house with twenty rooms, Josolyne (23 years old) had to ensure that every corner was clean and tidy. When in January he was also ordered to keep alive the 20 fires that heated his weak balance, he jumped into the air.
The stories of Richard, John and Eliza have different characters, settings and dates, but they share the same ending: the Bethlem Royal Hospitalone of the most famous psychiatric hospitals in the world and the one that has contributed the most to creating the myth of the nightmare asylum. Also one of the oldest. Since its foundation, in the 13th century, and until its therapies began to modernize between the 18th and 19th centuries, the London sanatorium left disastrous chapters.
For years more than a hospital It was almost a “human zoo”a gallery where the rich of London flocked to (after paying a shilling per entry) enjoy the spectacle of the “crazy ones.” In 1681 rulers shamelessly referred to patients as “lunatickes”, a mixture of “lunatic” and “tickets”. Added to the public humiliation were cruel treatment and deplorable conditions.
Bethlem in 1739.
The black legend of Bethlem has been replicated a thousand times in literature and in 1946 inspired Mack Robson for his film Bedlam, Psychiatric Hospital. Today it is a center respected in the United Kingdom, but has not yet managed to completely shake off that disastrous past.
From time to time it appears from the most unexpected corner. Five years ago, workers working on London’s Crossrail (an underground train to improve the City’s communication) came across an unpleasant surprise: bones. A pile of human bones. Upon investigation it was discovered that they belonged to the old cemetery from the psychiatric hospital. Between the mass graves with Bethlem inmates and the corpses left by the Black Death, it is estimated that there could be 4,000 skeletons.
Bethelem, the remote origin of everything
The origin of the psychiatric hospital dates back to 1247. Simon FitzMaryformer sheriff of London, donated land in Bishopsgate to build an asylum which was named Priory of St. Mary of Bethlehem. From that name the abbreviations Bethlem and Bedlam were derived, today synonymous of commotion and chaos. Liverpool Street station now stands at that location. Decades later, the center is already listed as a hospital and around 1400 it welcomed inpatients. In 1547 Henry VII made the decision to hand it over to the city of London to house its mentally ill patients.
Over the centuries and as its activity increased, the psychiatric hospital changed locations. When the old medieval building became too small in 1676, the hospital moved to a new and opulent one located in Moorfields. Its creator, Robert Hooke, wanted it to be the Versailles of London and threw the house out the window: he planned a 165-meter-long façade, Corinthian columns, a tower with a dome, gardens… “It was a contrast: that grandiose façade and the somber interior,” explained in 2017 to the BBC Mike Jay, author of This Way Madness Lies.
Great, but a total ruin. The heavy façade soon cracked and the hospital suffered serious damage. leaks. Writers like Thomas Browne doubted whether the “madmen” were the inmates or those responsible for that nonsense.
The psychiatric hospital would be moved two more times. In 1815, to St. George’s Fields, in Southwark, to a building that has been occupied by the Imperial War Museum since 1936. And in 1930 Beckenhamits location even today. During his journey he passed through all kinds of hands. Towards the end of the 16th century, James I put his doctor Helkiah Crooke in charge of the hospital. It is suspected that the doctor he was so good with the scalpel as with the sack. In 1632, a decade after taking office, he was removed amid accusations of corruption and neglect of his duties.
Bethlem is not remembered, however, for Hooke’s strident project or the corruption of those responsible. It is because of the chains, confinements and punishments that the patients suffered. Not always in the same way. Towards the end of the 19th century, pain therapy was “prescribed” within its walls. rotationa practice supposedly inspired by the theories of Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the famous naturalist author of The origin of species: Sitting the patient in a chair suspended high so that he turned and turned during long sessions.
William Hogarth’s “A Rake’s Progress” series of paintings ended in Bethlem.
Throughout the 18th century, cold baths or shackles were not unusual either. Of Edward Wakefield (a pioneer in the colonization of New Zealand) is said to have spoken in horror of the naked, starving men chained to the walls he encountered during a visit to Bedlam in 1814.
Fair attraction for the bourgeoisie
For one shilling, visitors could tour the psychiatric hospital as if it were a zoo. For at least one period, inmates were exposed to the public. Nor was it unusual for them to be allowed to egg them on. “At that time (1610) there was nothing strange about encouraging such a spectacle: visiting Bethlem was seen as edifying for the same reasons as attending hangings was edifying,” explains to the BBC Jonathan Andrews, author of The History of Bethlehem. Tradition assures that up to 96,000 visitors in a single year.
Different personalities also passed through the psychiatric hospital. In 1732 the painter William Hogart began a series of eight canvases which would end two years later and in which the decline of Tom Rakewll, a bon vivant who squandered his father’s large inheritance on gambling, prostitutes and a luxurious life. The series ends with Tom wasted and desperate in a gloomy room in Bedlam.
The assassins (all frustrated) Edward Oxford and Margaret Nicholson were also confined in the sanatorium. The center even “housed” artists recognized, such as Dadd, Louis Wain or Jonathan Martin. For several years it was the home of playwright Nathaniel Lee.
The psychiatric hospital in a photograph from 1896.
As time went by, practices at Bedlam modernized. In 1684 the brilliant physician and anatomist Edward Tyson assumed leadership and decided to make improvements: he hired nurses and created a fund to help the poorest patients, who could not even afford clothes. In 1852 the arrival of Dr. William Charles Hood was equally decisive in the change of course. For ten years he worked intensely to improve the conditions of the psychiatric hospital and, especially, to segregate the criminally insane.
Its origins in the 13th century make Bedlam one of the psychiatric hospitals oldest of the world. Some authors consider him to be the pioneer, although this statement is far from arousing unanimity. Professor of Psychiatry JJ López-Ibor maintainsand, for example, that this honor is held by a hospital founded by Father Jofré in Valencia in 1410. The key, he explains, is that behind its walls “the inmates were considered sick and its activities were intended to relieve them and, when that was possible, cure them.”
Although St. Mary of Bethlehem was founded in 1247 and housed people with mental illnesses as early as 1377, it would not be until 1473 when they began to be given “proper medical assistance.” Whether it was always quality or humanitarian until the 18th… That is another question.
In Xataka | We have found an ancient bone in Córdoba. Some believe it is part of Hannibal’s war elephants.
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