![]() ![]() The last section of Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s 1604 comedy The Honest Whore, Part I shows this permeability between ‘sanity’ and ‘madness’ and the fear of how easy it would be to slip from one to the other: the asylum’s sweeper says cheerfully, “I sweep the madmen’s rooms, and fetch straw for ‘em, and buy chains to tie ‘em, and rods to whip ‘em. Often – as in Shakespeare’s plays Hamlet and Macbeth – it was used as a way to explore the popular question of who was mad, who was sane, and who had the power to decide. Over time, Bethlem began to specialise in caring for those who weren’t simply poor, but also incapable of caring for themselves – particularly those considered ‘mad’.īy the 17th Century, the asylum was well-known enough to appear in numerous Jacobean dramas and ballads. Those with nowhere else to go turned up at the priory’s doors. ![]() By 1400, it had become a medieval “hospital” – which then didn’t imply medical care, but simply meant “a refuge for strangers in need”, Jay notes. Like many old hospitals, Bethlem began as a religious order it was founded in the 13th Century as a priory dedicated to St Mary of Bethlehem. Then it becomes a generic term, and then it’s something that means more than an asylum – there are all these metaphors of the world being ‘a great bedlam’.” “Any asylum is called a ‘bedlam’ quite early on. It becomes this proverbial, archetypal home of madness,” says Mike Jay, author of the book This Way Madness Lies, published to accompany the exhibition Bedlam: the asylum and beyond now at London’s Wellcome Collection. “It was a landmark in the City of London, right by Bishopsgate, and it was also one of the very first to specialise in people who were called ‘mad’ or ‘lunatic’. Almost from the start, Bethlem was much more than a mental asylum. ![]() This was Bethlem Hospital, more commonly known by its nickname (and the word adapted from it): Bedlam. And the building it was housed in from 1676 appeared so opulent that it was compared to none other than the Palace of Versailles. It inspired countless poems, dramas and works of art. It was a London landmark so famous, tourists would visit it alongside Westminster Abbey and the zoo so notorious, the very name came to mean madness and chaos. ![]()
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