Victorian Asylum

Bethlehem Royal Hospital (A.K.A Bedlam Hospital) had a terrible reputation of being a public attraction where members of the public would pay to gawp at the inmates, many of whom were chained.

Conditions were consistently dreadful, and the care amounted to little more than restraint. Violent or dangerous patients were manacled and chained to the floor or wall. Some were allowed to leave, and licensed to beg. Day to day management was in the hands of a Keeper, who received payment for each patient from their parish, livery company, or relatives.

Life in the asylum would have been hard - strict discipline and routine were seen as essential for people to get better.The asylum was like a separate world and was self-sufficient. Patients would chop wood for fires, grow food, wash sheets and even made the nurses uniforms!Those who couldn't work were marched around grassed yards called airing courts for exercise.The wards were locked and there were high railings around the asylum so no one could escape. There were even lookout points built into the staircases so staff could survey the corridors and day rooms.


A typical day in an Asylum

Patients are fed, lodged, and clad alike, wearing a dress of grey woollen cloth, which is woven and made up by themselves; they rise at 6A.M in the summer, and seven in the winter, and all who are in fit state, attend with such servants as can be spared at morning prayers precisely at eight o’clock. They breakfast on milk and pottage and bread at half past eight. At nine o’clock the gardener, farmer, laundry woman etc select those patients, who by previous arrangement with the Director have been fixed on, for their several occupations, and commence work.

At eleven, the workers have a luncheon of bread, and three quarters of a pint of table beer. They dine at one. Their dinners are one day, meat, yeast dumplings, and potatoes, and half a pint of beer: the next, soup, with potatoes and dumplings, alternately. At two work is resumed, and at four a luncheon is distributed, similar to that in the forenoon. At seven they have supper, of milk pottage and bread. At eight, the bedroom doors and window shutters are carefully locked, the clothes folded, and placed on the outside of each door.

   

Some of the treatments given in the asylum seem strange today - bleeding and purging with leeches, mustard plasters, footbaths, chops and beer were all used. Some of the more horrible treatments included muzzles to stop patients biting the nurses and a revolving chair which the patient was strapped in and spun around at 100 revolutions a minute. The West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum was one of the first to adopt employment as a way of helping people get better. Patients worked on the wards and in the asylum bakery, laundry, brewery and farm.