Britian's Most Infamous Asylum: Bethlehem
- macabremattersoffi
- Jun 29, 2023
- 3 min read
Bethlem Royal Hospital, also known as St. Mary Bethlehem, Bethlehem Hospital and Bedlam, is a psychiatric hospital in London. Its famous history has inspired several horror books, films, and TV series, most notably Bedlam, a 1946 film with Boris Karloff.
Founded in 1247, the hospital was originally near Bishopsgate just outside the walls of the City of London. It moved a short distance to Moorfields in 1676, and then to St George's Fields in Southwark in 1815, before moving to its current location in Monks Orchard in 1930.
Bethlem Royal Hospital was the first of its kind in Great Britain. Never before had there been a place for those with mental illness, physical disability, and a criminal history to be adequately locked away from society.
The word "bedlam", meaning uproar and confusion, is derived from the hospital's nickname. Although the hospital became a modern psychiatric facility, historically it was representative of the worst excesses of asylums in the era of lunacy reform.
Bethlem Royal Hospital earned its nickname Bedlam Hospital from the horrid conditions that its patients endured. Treatments included beatings and bloodletting from leeches. Patients were also starved and dunked into ice baths.
Each form of "treatment" that patients were subjected to was worse than the last. When they weren't being spun around in chairs or beaten before they were thrown in an ice bath, the staff attempted to literally---and disgustingly---expel their illnesses from their bodies. A doctor named William Black wrote that patients were placed in straitjackets and given laxatives, which was seen at Bethlem as one of the "principal remedies." Hearing voices? Some explosive diarrhea oughta clear that up. Seizures? One diarrhea for you. Diarrhea for everyone!
After relocating north of London to the Moorfields in the 1600s, the hospital's mentally ill patients became a playground for the gross misuse of power.
By 1675, the hospital was filled with schizophrenic and epileptic patients who were "treated" with rotational therapy, which involved strapping them to a chair suspended from the ceiling and spinning them around until they vomited. Once strapped in the chair, patients were often spun more than 100 times a minute, inducing mind-bending vertigo.
At the time, bloodletting was believed to be a completely acceptable and normal way to cure a patient of a variety of mental and physical ailments. Doctors thought that they could literally bleed a sickness out of a patient, which not only doesn't work, it extra-double doesn't work on mental illnesses. Many of the patients were forced to undergo treatment with leeches and the induction of blisters, which mostly just sounds unpleasant, but it often proved fatal. Reportedly, the physicians at the time at least understood that everyone needs blood, so only patients who were deemed strong enough to undergo treatment were allowed to have this "cure."
The other way that they performed bloodletting was that they would take a small hand drill, put it to the patient’s temple and drill a small hole to allow the blood to just pour out. This was also an ancient method as well, said to let the evil spirits out of those who were behaving abnormally.
Lobotomies were performed similarly to this since the “ice pick” method didn’t come around until the 1940s. That would sever the nerves in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, reducing the patient to a vegetative state or to the mental capacity of a toddler.
In conclusion, Bethlehem aka Bedlam Hospital is still functioning to this day. Their treatments are no longer as brutal as they were in the past, they have so many speciality services such as the National Psychosis Unit. Other services include the Bethlem Adolescent Unit, which provides care and treatment for young people aged 12–18 from across the UK. The hospital has an occupational therapy department, which has its own art gallery, the Bethlem Gallery, displaying work of current and former patients.
Resources:
https://www.historyhit.com/bedlam-the-story-of-britains-most-infamous-asylum/ - Bedlam: the Story of Britain’s most infamous asylum
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