Bedlam

In the 1760s, William Hogarth engraved a series of plates relating a moral tale of a character named Tom Rakewell. These plates criticized contemporary society and plate 8, shows Tom dying in Bethlem asylum. The engraving is important because it shows the pervading ideas about mental illness and its various forms. Tom is being restrained using chains because his sinful living has driven him mad. Religion and science are also causes for madness as seen in the delusional man dressed as the pope and the man performing geometric calculations on the wall. The aristocratic women spectators viewing the insane as a form of entertainment would have been common.

Prompted by images such as Hogarth’s, Victorians reacted against Bedlam and pushed for reforms. One of the first reforms was the County Asylums Act of 1808 which provided asylums for pauper mentally ill and empowered Justices of Peace to get money to finance mental institutions. The County Asylums required counties to create asylums and the Lunacy Act of 1845 worked to improve people’s living conditions within the asylum system. Colney Hatch, a mental institution that Conolly supported, did not allow for restraints to be used against the patients and focused instead on domestication particularly moral management which advocated treating the mentally ill like rational people and providing psychiatric help. Its opening in 1851 comes from Victorian optimism and the grandeur view of psychiatry as the highest product of human civilization.

During our visit to Benthem we were able to look into old case record books from the late 1890s. It was interesting that scientists still had a difficult time explaining mental illness. The formalized process of taking detailed notes on psychiatric patients began in 1816, although doctors had been taking notes in their private journals for many years before the system went into place. The case book that my group and I got was one for women admitted to Bedlam in 1899. One of the cases we looked at was regarding a woman who had had attacks where she would be able to speak coherently and was generally anxious. The doctor responsible for her care suggested that she take a series of baths which would last anywhere from an hour to five or six. These baths were carefully recorded on a piece of graph paper and had been stapled in with her other medical records.

Why did mental illness increase so dramatically in the Victorian era? Did domestication actually help? Did domestication and improvements of asylums make paupers willing to enter them as an alternative to workhouses? Why were Victorians so proud that they were constructing more asylums than had ever been constructed before? How would having mental illness make them superior to the countries they were colonizing?