Records reveal that many people spent their lives locked in asylums having been sent there for reasons other than madness, including in one instance for excessive shopping in her husband’s opinion. There was also the fact that men and women who behaved in a socially unacceptable way could be deemed to be mad and shut away, often for the rest of their lives. The wealthy insane were being paid for by their families and resided in private sanitariums or were locked up in various secluded attic rooms (see Jane Eyre and The Woman in White for literary examples.) Almost inevitably lunacy became a condition in many counties as a method of differentiating between the deserving and undeserving poor. The idea was that the poor insane should be removed from workhouses and prisons. The 1808 County Asylum Act dealt with fund raising methods that combined taxation with public subscription. The 1800 Criminal Lunatic Act was particularly interested in securing those people who wanted to assassinate the monarch and the criminally insane. It would have to be said that the terminology by which mental health was described throughout history gives very little thought to the patients or their families.īy the end of the nineteenth century more than 70,000 patients had passed through the doors of an insane asylum of some kind or other. This post is not a definitive guide – its research for my own nefarious reasons. I want to look in this post at the development of the law during the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century with a view to understanding the process by which women could become confined to a county mental hospital during the Great War. However, this is not a post about the eighteenth century or earlier. By 1735 Hogarth was using Bedlam to end his social moral fable of the Rake’s Progress and the conditions in which patients found themselves were horrendous.įans of Poldark will no doubt have noted that the care of George Warleggan in the eighteenth century has to date not been kind following the death of his wife Elizabeth – he’s been half drowned, starved, restrained and leeched within an inch of his life. By 1377 it had become home to people suffering from mental illness or as the inhabitants were described at the time – “distracted persons.” The law meanwhile was concerned that landowners were of sound mind and indeed the law continued to be concerned about property throughout the centuries. ![]() ![]() ![]() The word Bedlam comes from the Priory of St Mary at Bethlehem which was founded in London during the thirteenth century.
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