Comments for Bethlem Blog

Comment on Life in a Victorian Asylum 3: Patient Rights by downssyndromeassociation

downssyndromeassociation — Mon, 13 May 2013 09:30:33 +0000

Reblogged this on Langdon Down Museum of Learning Disability.

Comment on Normansfield: Past, Present, Future by downssyndromeassociation

downssyndromeassociation — Thu, 09 May 2013 14:12:37 +0000

Reblogged this on Langdon Down Museum of Learning Disability.

Comment on From Melancholia to Prozac: Depression throughout History by Colin Gale

Colin Gale — Thu, 02 May 2013 11:57:10 +0000

Our visiting school groups aren’t alone in thinking that Melancholy Madness “doesn’t look sad”. In his book ‘Physiognomy of Mental Diseases’, Alexander Morison (physician to Bethlem Hospital from 1835 to 1853), wrote that if the statue were “attentively examined”, it would be seen to represent not “Melancholy Insanity” but “the variety termed Dementia; that state in which the symptoms of melancholy, previously existing, have now disappeared, and deprivation of intellect and of mental energy has gradually succeeded”.

Comment on An Inconvenient Nuance 4 by Sue

Sue — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:09:56 +0000

I am still looking for some figures on the number of women who were detained because they had illegitimate children. So far I haven’t found any, but the fact that the Times found three women in just one institution who had survived into the 1970s (bearing in mind that some women would have been born in the 1880s or 90s) suggests that there may have been hundreds.
However many there were, it wasn’t enough for the central authority, the Board of Control, who kept chivvying the Poor Law authorities. For example in July 1919 they sent a circular to Boards of Guardians reminding them of the urgency of dealing with “imbecile and feeble-minded women of child-bearing age”. There followed two pages about mentally defective women with several illegitimate children and the burden on the ratepayers, etc.
The requirement to be feeble-minded as well as having an illegitimate child didn’t provide much protection as feeble-mindedness was such an ill-defined category.
Even before the Mental Deficiency Act 1913 came into force, the Commissioners in Lunacy were saying that women who had illegitimate children could be certified under the Lunacy Acts.

Comment on Just Visiting: Charlotte Bronte (1 of 2) by Lesley Krueger

Lesley Krueger — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 18:33:11 +0000

[...] Please visit the first blog at: http://bethlemheritage.wordpress.com/2012/05/14/just-visiting-charlotte-bronte-1-of-2/ [...]

Comment on The Carnival of Emotions at the Wonder Street Fair by suequick

suequick — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 22:21:49 +0000

My emotions are un-datable.

Comment on An Inconvenient Nuance 4 by Colin Gale

Colin Gale — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 22:18:16 +0000

Thank you for responding to points made here and elsewhere on this blog. I take the comments you have made in the spirit of an informed conversation about regimes of mental health treatment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a conversation to which this blog can only make a modest contribution, but one which I trust your book will do much to promote.

If one of the results of this conversation turns out to be renewed interest, scholarly and otherwise, in the records of so-called ‘mental deficiency’, then I will be very glad.

Comment on Latest News on Richard Dadd by bethlemheritage

bethlemheritage — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 09:17:48 +0000

As far as we’re aware, Dadd didn’t have any children (he certainly didn’t marry before he came to Bethlem). He did have a number of siblings, so perhaps there was a nephew called Philip. Where did you come across the relation?

Comment on Latest News on Richard Dadd by Robert Dudman

Robert Dudman — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 20:33:54 +0000

Did Richard Dadd have a son called Philip Dadd. would be good if you could help me on this Thanks Robert Dudman

Comment on An Inconvenient Nuance 4 by Sarah Wise

Sarah Wise — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 20:12:43 +0000

That is the very thrust of my book — that humanitarianism, and libertarianism for that matter, with regard to those certified as lunatic were higher up the agenda in the 19th century than they were for the greater part of the twentieth.