For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Moving the Mad (04.06.2010)

If you would bear with me for a while as I tell you the tale of how Bedlam became synonymous with a state of total chaos.

Built in 1250 the first Bethlehem hospital was situated just outside the City’s walls near Bishopsgate. Where now the ANdAZ Hotel in Liverpool Street now stands, on a wall adjacent to it a blue plaque marks Bethlehem Hospital’s location. It was here the priory of St. Mary of Bethlehem and like all religious orders in Catholic England it had a duty to help the poor and needy.

Within 100 years the priory had been expanded and new parts were specifically designed to house the “weak of mind”. As auteristic as the monks would appear the treatment meted out to inmates were appalling, if not killed for being possessed with the devil, they were shackled or chained to the wall throughout their stay was the norm. Never washed, fed like animals and as a change to their routine would be ducked in freezing water or whipped.

With the Dissolution of the Monasteries the Priory was converted to a place for those who “entirely lost their wits and God’s great fit of reasoning, the whiche only distinguisheth us from the beast”.

In the late 17th century the hospital moved to open fields just outside Moorfields. A beautiful purpose classical building was provided not for inmates comfort (overcrowding and insanitary conditions prevailed), but for the entertainment of Londoner’s at the weekend. Social attitudes had changed towards them and hundreds would arrive to look around the madhouse, it was deemed to “guarantee to amuse and lift the spirits”.

The hospital’s principle income came from these visitors who paid good money to have their spirits lifted and evidence of wardens deliberately working up the patients to act even more wildly on Sunday afternoons.

The hospital’s name had, over the years, been abbreviated to Bethlem, but now the hospital had become known as Bedlam and the word became synomous with a scene of chaos. It was only when King George III became mad and his plight aroused sympathy that social attitudes started to change.

In the early 19th century that the hospital moved from Moorfields to the building that is now the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth. The patients were brought across London in a long line of Hackney cabs that were prepared to go south of the River with the inmates under a careful guard.

The latest of the long line of buildings is a hospital built at Addington in Surrey.