Body: | The history of Psychiatry
Mad-Doctors & Mad-House Keepers of the 1750's
"I think it is a very hard case for a man to be locked up in an asylum and
kept there; you may call it anything you like, but it is a prison." (Sir
James Coxe, testimony before the House of Commons Select Committee on the
Operations of the Lunacy Laws, 1877)
Also known as "alienists", Mad Doctors were the forerunners of psychiatrists.
They were quacks in the 18th century and they are still quacks today!
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"The keepers at Bedlam are idle, skulking, pilfering scoundrels, eccentric, murders, have something peculiar about them, strange in appearance, bribery is common to all, cruelty is common to all, villainy is common to all, in short every thing is common but virtue." (Urbane Metcalf 1818, John Conolly 1859)
Introduction:
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"Mad doctors" also known as "alienists", Doctors were the
forerunners of psychiatrists.
"Alienists" was a title they derived from standing up and testifying
in open court about a persons mental health.
The "keepers" of the Mad houses, known today as psychiatric nurses!
The "keeper managers" are known today as psychiatric nurse managers
of a ward.
"Many of the asylum doctors were no more than medically qualified
gaolers [jailers], whose only attempts at "care" were the tactics of
restraint and punishment so angrily summarised by Swift a century earlier.
"Though 'tis hopeless to reclaim them, scorpion rods perhaps may tame
them" [Jonathan Swift.]" (British Psychiatry at 150, J. Birley, Lancet,
1991 AD)
"T. Bakewell (1815) had stated that, at some madhouses, the
pecuniary interest of the proprietor and the secret wishes of the lunatics'
relatives, led not only to the neglect of all means of cure, but also to
the deliberate prevention and delay of recovery, conduct which he
considered a crime that may be perpetrated with perfect impunity as to
human laws'. This statement is in keeping with what Mitford (1825 ?)
claimed to be the rule at Warburton's house, namely: 'If a man comes in
here mad, we'll keep him so; if he is in his senses, we'll soon drive him
out of them." Similarly, 100 years previously, Defoe had stated that if
persons were not mad on entering a madhouse, they were soon made so by the
barbarous usage they there suffer . . . Is it not enough to make one mad to
be suddenly clap'd up, stripp'd, whipp'd, ill fed, and worse us'd ? C.
Crowther (1838) observed that in private-madhouses the rich did not recover
in the same proportion as the poor"." (The Trade in Lunacy, William Ll.
Parry-Jones, 1972 AD, p 241)
Click to View Full discussion and analysis of William Battie's
"A Treatise on Madness"
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William Battie
A. The Mad doctors power thirst" Banish the preachers!
Psychiatry has a long history of being hostile to Christianity! This
is where it all began. The mess we currently find ourselves in 2010 AD,
started in the 1700's with the creation and centralization of mad houses.
They were viewed as quacks by almost everyone and quacks they were,
but worked hard at gaining respect with an increasingly well organized
campaign.
In the 1800's mad doctors succeeded in gained trust with elected
officials, the courts and the general public who blindly viewed them as
"experts".
In the 1600's it is clear that preachers of churches (clergyman)
played a central role in treating and helping the mentally ill. This new
breed of generally atheistic mad doctors needed to replace the traditional
and God given role of preachers with themselves!
In order to carve out their own territory, one of the first things
they did was keep preachers of local churches out of every aspect of the
mentally ill and mad houses. Indeed, they made the outrageous claim that
preachers and Christians actually caused people to be mentally ill. In fact
they openly stated that anyone claiming to have divine guidance were
automatically mentally ill.
By the end of the 1700's preachers were formally barred from not
only having input in determining if a person is insane, they were actually
banned from even entering the mental hospitals!
This process continues today where insurance companies and lawyers
actually advise local churches and preachers NOT to even counsel anyone,
even if they are sane! This represents a complete take over of a territory
once owned by preachers and churches! It is driven by power, money and
atheism! Welcome to the world of modern psychiatry!
"The rise of psychiatry as an organized profession, with which we
shall be concerned in the following chapters, is thus but a particular
instance of a much broader phenomenon, what Harold Perkin has termed "the
rise of professional society." During the nineteenth century,
knowledge-particularly but not exclusively scientific
knowledge-increasingly became a resource from which a variety of newly
consolidating and self-conscious groups sought to extract a living.
Mad-doctors, or as they increasingly preferred to call themselves,
alienists or medical psychologists, were merely one of a whole array of
groups seeking recognition and social status on this basis. Unlike their
entrepreneurial counterparts in the manufacturing sector, the new
professionals were in the business of selling something intangible: skill
and expertise rather than material goods." (The Transformation Of The
Mad-Doctoring Trade, Andrew Scull, 1994 AD, p 5)
"Like others engaged in this project of collective social mobility,
mad-doctors had to seek public approval and trust, and as they struggled to
establish control over a particular territory and to define and protect the
boundaries of their jurisdiction, they necessarily found themselves engaged
in a never-ending campaign of persuasion and propaganda. Trust is vital to
the professional because he or she needs to secure assent to claims to
possess, not just skills and knowledge that the laity lacks, but skills and
knowledge the professional argues the public is not even in a position to
assess with any degree of precision. Likewise, the laity must come to trust
that members of the profession will exercise their skills in a
disinterested fashion and in large degree must be persuaded to rely upon
the professionals' own valuation of their knowledge. Yet trust was a
particularly difficult commodity for mad-doctors to acquire, not least
because their involvement in the trade in lunacy prompted endemic suspicion
about their motives, and because their claims to possess expertise in the
identification and treatment of madness provoked persistent scepticism even
among those laymen most heavily involved in the campaign for lunacy reform.
The prominent role played by medical men in the whole series of scandals
about treatment in asylums and madhouses that erupted in the first half of
the nineteenth century only intensified the difficulty of the task they
confronted. Yet, in the face of these and other obstacles, a recognized
specialism did emerge over the course of the nineteenth century and secured
some signifificant respect. The mad-doctors known to the authorities grew
from two or three thousand in 1800 to almost one hundred thousand [100,000]
a century later, their guardians successfully constituted themselves as the
public arbiters of mental disorder, the experts in its diagnosis and
disposal. They created a professional organization to defend and advance
their interests and edited journals and wrote monographs to provide a forum
for transmitting (and giving visible evidence of) the body of expert
knowledge to which they laid claim. During Victoria's long reign, they
increasingly dominated public discourse about insanity, and in the process,
they elaborated and refined a set of career structures and opportunities
for themselves. Fragile as their public standing might be, marginal and
somewhat embarrassing as their medical brethren might find them,
psychiatrists nonetheless had secured some accoutrements of professional
status, if only as the custodians of a chronically incapacitated and
generally economically deprived clientele and as advisers on mental hygiene
to a broader population concerned to avoid such a dismal destiny." (The
Transformation Of The Mad-Doctoring Trade, Andrew Scull, 1994 AD, p 6)
B. The Mad doctors "causes" (etiology) of mental illness:
As we trace the opinions of mad doctors as to the etiology of
insanity, we see a common theme: a combination of bad living + bad bodies
(bad blood, bad brain matter, bad nerve fibers)
In John Monro openly stated that no one would ever discover the
cause of mental illness that he certainly had no idea. However, he
prescribed all the standard humoral treatments of bloodletting and vomits.
It appears Monro was more concerned with controlling the mentally ill by
chains and jail cells, than research into the causes and treatments of
madness.
"John Monro was without question one of the most famous mad-doctors
of his generation. Besides his position at Bethlem Hospital, he was also a
major figure in the emerging private "trade in lunacy" that was so notable
a feature of eighteenth-century England's burgeoning consumer society.
Monro attended Bethlem at a time when the hospital's custom of exposing the
insane to the eyes of sightseers reached its apogee. In the last years of
his tenure as its physician, the practice was radically curtailed-though
not at his initiative-after a wave of public, literary, and media
protest. Recognized by contemporaries as a leading authority on insanity,
Monro's close social connections with members of the aristocracy and
gentry, as well as with medical professionals, politicians, and divines,
ensured for him a significant place in the social, political, cultural, and
intellectual world of his time." (Undertaker of the mind: John Monro,
Jonathan Andrews, Andrew Scull, 2001 AD, p xiv)
Whereas John Monro allowed the public to enter the asylums to mock,
ridicule and torment the insane, Battie rejected all this and made the
asylum a quiet place of peace. But there were other asylums that were
already doing this like Dr. Fox's mad house near Bristol, so Battie was
merely copying them. "The patient was to be removed entirely from the
context wherein he or she had become mad, including family, friends and
external pressures. Only in such a state of asylum could treatment have a
chance of success. Moreover, Battie dismissed a wide range of conventional
treatments, ... asserting that management, by which he meant a temperate
and ordered mode of living within the regimen of the asylum, would do more
than medicine, and that any application of medicine should be judged
according to the needs and constitution of the patient." (Patterns of
Madness in the Eighteenth Century, A Reader, Allan Ingram, 1998 AD, p112)
William Battie was in important historical figure because he wrote a
complete book on defining, diagnosing and treating madness, including the
causes of madness. He was a quack, but there are valuable lessons to be
learned because in many ways, modern psychiatry has made almost no progress
from William Battie in 1750 AD.
C. Mad house Keepers: Overview
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The keepers at Bedlam are idle, skulking, pilfering scoundrels,
eccentric, murders, have something peculiar about them, strange in
appearance, bribery is common to all, cruelty is common to all, villainy is
common to all, in short every thing is common but virtue.
"this I will say of [keeper] Rodbird, that he is an idle, skulking,
pilfering scoundrel, and during the time I am speaking of, he was not upon
an average, in his gallery three hours in the day and this could not be
without the stewards knowledge and connivance." (The Interior Of Bethlem
Hospital, Urbane Metcalf, 1818 AD)
"It would extend far beyond the limits of this little work to
portray the villainies practised by the Jacks in office, bribery is common
to them all; cruelty is common to them all; villainy is common to them all;
in short every thing is common but virtue, which is so uncommon they take
care to lock it up as a rarity. Like other establishments this appears to
be erected too much for the purpose of making lucrative places; the
apartments appropriated to the use of the officers are elegant in the
extreme, every thing which luxury can covet is at their command; they eat,
they fatten, while the poor creatures under their charge are left to all
the miseries which confinement and privation can inflict; good God; in
England, in this country, so famed for its munificence, surely the miseries
of the wretched inmates of this humane institution are totally unknown to
the exalted characters who support it, they should not sleep till the
abuses are altogether removed; their supiness is the villain's security,
their activity alone can prevent the new establishment falling a prey to
the miseries and cruelties which disgraced Old Bethlehem." (The Interior Of
Bethlem Hospital, Urbane Metcalf, 1818 AD)
"The class of people taking care of lunatics [keepers] has, within
my own experience, very much improved, I remember when almost every man who
kept [i.e. hospital nurses] an asylum was an eccentric, or had something
peculiar about him, or strange in his appearance, and was more calculated
to knock a patient down than to cure him; that was the general character of
them." (John Conolly, testimony before the House of Commons Select
Committee on the Care and Treatment of Lunatics, 1859)
"I was under a keeper of the name of Davies; far be it from me
unnecessarily to rake up the ashes of the dead, but this I must say, he was
a cruel, unjust and drunken man, and for many years as keeper secretly
practised the greatest cruelties to those under his care; he was some time
previous to his death, porter, and when he died the committee had the
goodness, thinking he had been a good servant, to give a handsome sum
towards the expences of his funeral, but they were greatly deceived." (The
Interior Of Bethlem Hospital, Urbane Metcalf, 1818 AD)
Mad house Keepers: Murderers
Murders: "This man [Blackburn] possesses an improper control over
the officers, and no doubt stands high in the estimation of some governors,
I will endeavour to unmask him. In the Old House there was a patient of the
name of Fowler, who one morning was put in the bath by Blackburn, who
ordered a patient then bathing, to hold him down, he did so, and the
consequence was the death of Fowler, and though this was known to the then
officers it was hushed up; shameful!" (The Interior Of Bethlem Hospital,
Urbane Metcalf, 1818 AD)
Chained to death by Gangrene: "Likewise a patient named Popplestone,
I believe he came from Cornwall, during a severe winter was so long chained
in his room that the iron round his leg literally eat into his flesh, in
this dreadful state he lay unattended, until Blackburn [keeper manager]
became accidentally acquainted with his situation, the lock was clogged
with dirt so that he Blackburn, was obliged to borrow an awl of Truelock to
clear it; a short time afterwards Popplestone's leg rotted off and he died
in the house, this should have been sufficient to provoke an investigation,
but it was hushed up; shameful neglect!" (The Interior Of Bethlem Hospital,
Urbane Metcalf, 1818 AD)
Mad house Keepers: Sexual assaulting women
Sexual assault by the male "Keepers": "Do you remember a keeper of
the name of King, at Bethlem, who is now at Liverpool? Perfectly. Was not
he employed as keeper of the female patients at Bethlem? He was
occasionally. Was not King, when keeper of the female patients, charged by
Mr. Till, the manager of the London waterworks, with being too familiar
with a female patient of great beauty, such female having been a servant of
Mr. Till? I do not know that he was charged by Mr. Till with too great
familiarity, but the patient herself did charge him with that. He being the
keeper of the female patients at that time? Yes; she complained to me of
it. What was the result of that investigation? There was great asseveration
on one side, and denial of it on the other; I do not know whether we got at
the truth. Was not the regulation immediately made by the governors, for
not again employing men as keepers of women? They had endeavoured to do
that long before, upon another business. Did not the governors, from
learning that fact, direct that no man should again be put as keeper of the
women? I do not recollect that they came to any resolution upon that case;
it was about three years ago." (Report From The Committee On Madhouses In
England, 1815 AD, Testimony of John Haslam)
Sexual assault by the male "Keepers": "Some years ago, a female
patient had been impregnated twice, during the time she was in the
Hospital; at one time she miscarried; and the person who was proved to have
had connexion with her, being a keeper, was accordingly discharged."
(Report From The Committee On Madhouses In England, 1815 AD, Testimony of
John Haslam)
Mad house Keepers: Neglect of human needs
neglectful with bad food: "Mr. Humby the steward, in my humble
opinion acts with great injustice, he admits provisions of the worst
quality; the beer during the twelve months that I speak of was exceedingly
bad, not fit in general, for any person to drink, the cheese was very bad;
the butter was very often bad; the meat in general very bad; the potatoes
very bad; none of the provisions fair upon an average but the bread, and I
have understood that is not under his management." (The Interior Of Bethlem
Hospital, Urbane Metcalf, 1818 AD)
Neglectful of basic human needs: "There is a patient of the name of
William Stockley, who is a poor confused creature, he is a strong young
man, but he is entirely made a slave of by the keeper and by any other
patient that pleases in the gallery, and not only so, but he is sent a
great deal of his time down into the laundry to be made a drudge of there,
and this with Mr. H. the steward's knowledge and leave; and very often is
sent to bed without his supper through Mr. Rodbird's kindness, and I know
that he has not a clean pair of stockings more than once in three months,
though his friends and the governors no doubt, think he is made
comfortable." (The Interior Of Bethlem Hospital, Urbane Metcalf, 1818 AD)
Mad house Keepers: Thieves and pilferers
Pilfers: "Charles Saunders, had in the old house, though as
inoffensive as a child, had been kept chained for years, that the keeper
might have his clothes to sell." (The Interior Of Bethlem Hospital, Urbane
Metcalf, 1818 AD)
Thieves and pilferers: "Mr. Vickery the cutter [butcher], has it in
his power to defraud the patients in many instances, and he never suffers
an opportunity to pass without gratifying his disposition to pilfering,
this cutter cuts down the allowances to some purpose, for instance, there
are two hundred patients in the house, and supposing he restrains his theft
to one ounce per head, in the meat he takes 36 lb. per week as his own
perquisites, bread in proportion; these perquisites he sells and manages to
live comfortably by depriving the patients of part of the food intended for
their sustenance." (The Interior Of Bethlem Hospital, Urbane Metcalf, 1818
AD)
Mad house Keepers: Abusive, brutal, beatings
Abusive: "Another patient of the name of Leonard, is in general a
very quiet man, I have known Rodbird the keeper, abuse him repeatedly and
set the other patients on to do it." (The Interior Of Bethlem Hospital,
Urbane Metcalf, 1818 AD)
Brutal: "Whilst looking at some of the bed-lying patients [at
Bedlam], a man arose naked from his bed, and had deliberately and quietly
walked a few paces from his cell door along the gallery; he was instantly
seized by the keepers, thrown into his bed, and leg-locked, without enquiry
or observation: chains are universally substituted for the
strait-waistcoat. In the men's wing were about 75 or 76 patients, with two
keepers and an assistant, and about the same number of patients on the
women's side; the patients were in no way distinguished from each other as
to disease, than as those who are not walking about or chained in the side
rooms, were lying stark naked upon straw on their bedsteads, each in a
separate cell, with a single blanket or rug, in which the patient usually
lay huddled up, as if impatient of cold, and generally chained to the
bed-place in the shape of a trough; about one-fifth were in this state, or
chained in the side rooms." (Report From The Committee On Madhouses In
England, 1815 AD, Testimony of A. Mr. E. Wakefield)
Brutal: "The Interior Of Bethlem Hospital, which he published
immediately after his release, is thus not only a unique insight into the
new regime after only two years, it also affords Metcalf the opportunity to
make comparisons with the old Moorfields Bethlem. While the new, according
to Metcalf is infinitely preferable, his pamphlet is nevertheless a protest
over conditions, in the line of Bruckshaw and Belcher, which are
intolerable, he asserts, because of the corruption and brutality of the
keepers. ... Metcalf has had first-hand experience, but as an observer, not
as a participant." (Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century, A
Reader, Allan Ingram, 1998 AD, p 256)
Beatings for no reason: "Another patient named Harris, for the
trifling offence of wanting to remain in his room a little longer one
morning than usual, was dragged by Blackburn [keeper manager], assisted by
Allen, the basement keeper, from No. 18, to Blackburn's room, and there
beaten by them unmercifully; when he came out his head was streaming with
blood, and Allen in his civil way wished him good morning." (The Interior
Of Bethlem Hospital, Urbane Metcalf, 1818 AD)
Beatings for no reason: "The case of Morris; this man had some pills
to take, which he contrived to secrete in his waistcoat pocket, this
Blackburn [keeper manager] discovered, and by the assistance of Allen, they
got him to his room and there beat him so dreadfully for ten minutes as to
leave him totally incapable of moving for some time, Rodbird was looking
out to give them notice of the approach of any of the officers; they are
three villians." (The Interior Of Bethlem Hospital, Urbane Metcalf, 1818
AD)
Brutal beatings for no reason: "Coles, a patient of Blackburn's
[keeper manager], one day, for refusing to take his physic [medicine to
induce vomits], was by Blackburn and Rodbird beat and dashed violently
against the wall several times, in the presence of the steward, though from
the general tenor of this man's conduct it is probable a little persuasion
would have been sufficient to induce him to take the medicine quietly,
Coles is since put upon the long list, [The 'long list' would be those
patients regarded as incurable.] and is now in the upper gallery." (The
Interior Of Bethlem Hospital, Urbane Metcalf, 1818 AD)
Conclusion:
Although William Battie was a quack, many of his treatments resemble
modern psychiatry.
Regarding the torture of the insane, all we can say is to quote
Urbane Metcalf: "Good God; in England, in this country?"
Mad houses and their keepers, were truly a very black mark against
humanity.
If this is what the mental hospitals were like, what were the jails
like?
By Steve Rudd: Contact the author for comments, input or corrections.
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