The so-called lunatics of the past did not have an easy time of it.
Those raving mad men and women were often treated more like monsters or deranged zombies
than people with a mental illness.
Sometimes said to be agitated by the moon, perhaps cursed by the devil, the mentally
ill of the past might be shackled, fastened to a wall, beaten, or might undergo extreme
and mostly inefficient forms of treatment.
Picture this scene, something that sometimes happened to schizophrenics or epileptics before
those words existed.
They are tied to a chair that is suspended from a ceiling by ropes.
The chair is spun violently around and around not for minutes, but sometimes hours, until
the occupant throws up the contents of his stomach.
But it got even worse, and in those old asylums many patients didn’t make it out.
If we are going to talk about the horror of the early asylums there is only one place
to start, and that’s with the institution once known as Bedlam.
This notorious asylum was said to be the first of its kind in Europe, and London was its
home.
Before such asylums were opened for people deemed lunatics – from the word ‘luna’
– and so maddened by the moon, there was of course mental illness.
In ancient times this was sometimes said to be an affliction sent from the Gods, but there
were less superstitious people who believed the ailment was purely physical.
Nonetheless, in ancient times people still had visions, they hallucinated, were depressed,
and skulls dug up from thousands of years ago show that before death the skull had been
trephined or trepanned.
That means making a hole in the skull.
In those days it was believed whatever bad spirit was making the person crazy might find
its way out through that hole.
Even today you can find cultures in which the mentally ill are said to be cursed, but
first let’s talk about the asylum whose name everyone knows.
These days when we hear the word bedlam, it’s mostly when someone is using it as an adjective
to describe chaos, or pandemonium.
How was the protest?
What happened after the explosion?
How was teaching a class of 50 kids after they’d all had sugary drinks for lunch?
The answer to all could be “bedlam.”
The institution became synonymous with chaos, and we’ll soon see why.
Bedlam was a nickname for the place, and it first went by the name “Priory of the New
Order of our Lady of Bethlehem.”
We won’t talk too much about those early days, but in the 13th and 14th centuries it
was merely a hospital for the poor.
It was said to be in the 15th century that it transitioned more to an insane asylum and
also a place to lock up people deemed insanely dangerous.
Around this time we can find some reports of what life was like in Bedlam, with some
sources saying patients would live in dank cells, sometimes covering themselves in their
own filth.
In the 1600s one person said what he saw were “cryings, screechings, roarings, brawlings,
shaking of chaines, swearings, frettings, chaffings.”
As time went on, physicians became more interested in trying to cure lunacy than to merely lock
people away in abject filth and forget about them.
Some of the earliest treatments were quite mild, with cold baths (hydrotherapy) being
very popular in the 1700s.
But that was about as good as it got, because like those ancients thinking people could
be purged of mental illness, the English doctors believed madness could be drawn out.
To do this sometimes they would bleed the patients, which was simply drawing blood but
sometimes using leeches for the job.
As we said, they might be spun around and induced to puke, but they might also just
be given a purgative drink to make them violently ill and emit profusely from both the mouth
and the rear end.
If that didn’t work, doctors might go to work on the skin, scarring the person or rubbing
them with ointments that would make the skin blister.
You can imagine that was the last thing someone needed who was depressed or paranoid.
You might also be surprised that at Bedlam you would find cupping glass therapy, the
suction treatment that is quite popular today and leaves you looking like you’ve been
massaged by a fat horse.
What surely made this worse, though, was the fact many of the patients were fastened to
manacles and so treatment wasn’t exactly pleasant nor did the service come with a smile.
It was likely closer to torture than curative therapy.
Just to give you an idea of how mental illness was thought of, in the 17th century two statues
were made at Bedlam.
One depicted “Melancholy” and the other “Raving Madness.”
The former just lies listless, while the latter is chained and looks rather perturbed.
In today’s world we might say these statues represent depression and perhaps a more psychotic
kind of illness.
But you might well find yourself in Bedlam if you were merely a habitual thief, and one
very famous patient was the fortune teller, Daniel Baker, who it’s said predicted the
Great Fire of London.
Even in the 18th century Bedlam wasn’t exactly a holiday home, with patients still being
beaten and starved until the thing inside them had vacated.
In 1811, one physician wrote, “In Bedlam the strait waistcoat when necessary, and occasional
purgatives are the principal remedies.
Nature, time, regimen, confinement, and seclusion from relations are the principal auxiliaries.”
As you can imagine, many patients became sick and died and so burial grounds were built
around the place.
The bodies were useful, too, because dissection was becoming popular so physicians could learn
more about anatomy.
Often what went on in Bedlam stayed in Bedlam, but in the 19th century investigations happened.
What some people saw when they entered were people chained naked to walls, left screaming,
moaning, starving, because the theory of the day was if you could break a person’s will
you could drive out the madness.
Even worse, Bedlam was sometimes treated like a human zoo, so anyone with a few shillings
to spare could pay entrance and walk around looking at the lunatics chained up and listen
to their ravings.
In 1771 in a book called “Man of Feeling”, the author described his visit to the zoo.
He said, “Their conductor led them first to the dismal mansions of those who are in
the most horrid state of incurable madness.
The clanking of chains, the wildness of their cries, and the imprecations which some of
them uttered, formed a scene inexpressibly shocking.”
Another person described it as a “freak show.”
Things significantly improved in the early 20th century, but hey, it wouldn’t be long
until lobotomy with an icepick would come along.
The USA had its own asylums, too, with the Blackwell Island Insane asylum said to be
a place where inhumane things happened.
A female journalist in 1887 did something quite heroic.
She pretended to be mad and got herself admitted so she could see what went down in the asylum.
On the inside she acted how she would normally act, sane, but that didn’t matter in terms
of how she was treated.
She wrote this of a day in her looney life there, when she interviewed a fellow female
patient.
The patient said, “For crying the nurses beat me with a broom-handle and jumped on
me.
Then they tied my hands and feet, and throwing a sheet over my head, twisted it tightly around
my throat, so I could not scream, and thus put me in a bathtub filled with cold water.
They held me under until I gave up every hope and became senseless.”
They broke her will, but didn’t cure her of anything.
In New York it wasn’t so different from the UK back then, with treatments mainly based
on purging the illness.
These were called humoral treatments, and as we said, might involve bloodletting, blistering
and expelling whatever is in the stomach.
But it’s said in the early 20th century a doctor at New Jersey’s Trenton State Hospital
took things a bit further.
He removed parts of the body, for good.
He took out the tonsils of patients, or even rotting teeth, because he thought the malady
might come from those places.
Sometimes called America’s biggest quack, this man called Henry Cotton, then started
to remove bits of the stomach, the intestines, parts of the thyroid gland, the colon, appendix
or gallbladder.
Not surprisingly, many patients didn’t make it and died while being ‘cured’ by this
mad doctor.
At around the same time another quack was injecting patients with malaria, thinking
the fever would make them sane.
Many of those patients didn’t make it, either.
About 15 percent of them died.
But we can go to some places around the world today where you might find more superstitious
treatments.
In 2018, the Atlantic wrote a long piece saying exorcisms were gaining traction these days,
noting one story in the US where a family called in an exorcist because their daughter
seemed to be fighting the devil inside.
Now this isn’t exactly about asylums, but it’s worth mentioning because if these people
are actually mentally ill, and not putting up the Prince of Darkness in their bodies
rent-free, then it’s still a kind of purgative treatment.
It’s not unlike those treatments in the asylums; tie someone up, starve them, leave
them, and the beat the devil out of them.
According to the Atlantic, citing a Gallop poll, about 50 percent of Americans believe
demonic possession is real.
Maybe by daring to say possession might be a mental illness we might have upset a lot
of our very pious viewers.
But such superstitious beliefs are global.
We found an article with an interview with the director of one of Thailand’s largest
psychiatric facilities.
He talked about what he found when his team went to do outreach work the countryside for
the first time.
He said, “We would go around all the villages in the north trying to locate people who needed
our help; we would find someone who had been locked in a cage or a small room in nearly
every village.
The locals would use traditional methods to cure them, like offering gifts of chickens
and wine to the spirit so it might release the victim from a demonic grasp.”
Hmm, chickens to propitiate the spirits, and the doctor said much of the time they were
merely autistic children in the cages.
That was not always the case, though, during that tour of the facility the interviewer
met a Thai woman who was convinced she was a Scottish princess.
Such a patient today will be treated with compassion and respect, but if the Thai-Scottish
royal had been around a century ago she might have been dressed in a straight-jacket and
deliberately put into a low blood sugar coma.
This was actually a thing in the early 20th century.
Doctors might also have induced seizures in her, or maybe nursed her as a baby so she
could grow up again.
Yep, that included bottle feeding and carrying a patient around like a newborn.
These days perhaps the treatments that scare people the most have to do with shocking the
mind with electricity, but it’s rarer now and only used in extreme circumstances.
We’ve already done an entire show on the history of lobotomies, so we won’t go into
that here.
We will just say it wasn’t that long ago that icepick lobotomies and others forms of
the operation were done to people who certainly didn’t need one.
We’ll just ask you one question, and that’s what do you think about all of this.
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video Worst Prison Experiments Conducted On Humans.
Thanks for watching, and as always don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.