A Sporting Chance 4

Cycling was a popular middle class pastime for both men and women in late nineteenth-century Europe. The year 1895, when Hospital chaplain Edward O’Donoghue discussed the topic in Under the Dome, falls at the beginning of what historians have called the “golden age” of cycling. O’Donoghue emphasised the sporting and recreational elements of the pursuit noting, in the whimsical tone he often adopted, that:

We number already several cyclists in the hospital, and no doubt in time we shall form a club under the title of the Bethlem Beagles, and hold a race meeting (under high patronage) in the gentlemen’s garden. It is quite possible that under such circumstances the turf might suffer considerably, but there is no reason why any human being should be run over or even scared, while so vast an array of windows commands a full view of the racing track.

While there is no evidence that the “Bethlem Beagles” ever genuinely existed, O’Donoghue’s words remind us of the interest in exercise, occupation and amusements in the Hospital. However, the chaplain might have baulked at the idea of Olympic cycling. In his own pursuit of the sport, he emphasised education, as well as exercise (he was a keen supporter of cultural and recreational pursuits, organising regular visits for parties of patients to museums, churches and other historical buildings). He concluded that:

I hear with envy and admiration of runs to Brighton and back, to Salisbury, or to Portsmouth in a day, for these are feats of strength and endurance worthy to be praised. … But at the same time I doubt if it is possible to enjoy the beauty of the country with a head bent over the handles and with the mind solely filled with the calculations of miles and hours. And I have a word to say about this riding from start to finish without a thought or a care for what is interesting or suggestive on the road. It is neglecting your education, I always fancy.

With cycling one of Britain’s most successful Olympic sports, it is probable that few have shared O’Donoghue’s concerns with “riding from start to finish” this summer!

---

Louis Wain cats cycling, 1896: Wellcome Library, London

[1]O’Donoghue, E. “Chaplain’s Column”, Under the Dome, vol. 4, no. 41 (June 1895), pp. 83-4

A Sporting Chance 2

Fifty years ago the late lamented journalist Alistair Cooke used one of his Letter from America broadcasts to argue for the English origins of baseball, a thesis that relied in part on a passing reference to the sport in one of the novels of Jane Austen.¹ We have no interest in advancing that thesis here, or doing anything other than noting the fact, mournful for baseball aficionados, of its withdrawal from the Olympic programme as of this year. Yet perhaps the recent runaway success of Chad Harbach’s novel The Art of Fielding will prompt a rethink on the part of the International Olympic Committee in time for Rio 2016?

Baseball was never played at Bethlem; but the indistinct photograph accompanying this post is contained within the Archives & Museum’s collections. It is of the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital team in Baltimore, Maryland. A published history of that psychiatric hospital records that “many baseball games were played between…patients and attendants, and with outside teams such as the Towson YMCA, policemen and firemen” in the late nineteenth century, and that “at one period the Sheppard Pratt team was even strengthened by the employment of semi-professionals”.²

The team photograph shows that players had ‘SP’ emblazoned on their uniforms at around the time of the First World War. Another (possibly earlier) photograph, reproduced in the abovementioned history, shows two teams assembled side by side, one with ‘Sheppard’ on their strip, the other with ‘Pratt’.

Photographs of this Baltimore hospital reached Bethlem via Dr Edward Brush, Sheppard Pratt’s Superintendent from 1891 to 1919, who enjoyed good collegiate relations across the Atlantic and sent effusive greetings to Bethlem on the occasion of its 670th anniversary in 1917, together with photographs later used by Geoffrey O’Donoghue, Bethlem’s chaplain in his lantern slide show which was absorbed in due course into the Archives & Museum’s collections.

¹ Alistair Cooke, Letter from America 1946-2004 (Penguin 2005), p. 107.

² Forbush and Forbush, Gatehouse: The Evolution of the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, 1853-1986 (1986), p. 42.

Windows onto the Past II

[ continued from previous post ]

In treating the early history of Bethlem Hospital, Edward O’Donoghue does not shrink from retrospective diagnosis of those who were brought to the shrine of Thomas á Becket for healing in the twelfth century. “Matilda of Cologne”, he wrote in 1914, “would find her place in a refractory ward today”.

“Her language was foul, she tore her clothes to pieces, and struck at everyone who tried to remove her. She also was tightly trussed, and thus bound she raved on for four or five hours [in the vicinity of Becket’s tomb], but by degrees she came to herself, when she said that she had seen in a dream the ‘martyr [Thomas] clothed in pontifical vestments with the blood streak across his face’.” ¹

This is a fair summary of the contemporary account of the miracle given by Benedict of Peterborough, but it omits the explanation given by Benedict of Matilda’s mental turmoil, which is twofold. At one level, the cause of her troubles was simply stated to be a “devil” who “left behind foul traces” at the time it was “driven out”. Yet Benedict intimates that there is more to Matilda’s case – or another way of looking at her case – than a solely supernatural perspective might offer. “When we asked her how she came to be insane, she said that her brother had killed a young man who loved her dearly, and that in a fit of madness she had struck with her fist her baby son [fathered by the murdered man, perhaps?]…and removed him from this world.” ²

This agonising story has a psychological depth that transcends the centuries. Matilda, we are told, left Canterbury “healed and joyful, concerned…about nothing but gaining forgiveness for her crime”. Both her torment and her recovery are vividly represented in the Cathedral windows (with rather less psychological realism, we venture to say) by the state of her hair. Interestingly, they were also the subject of a dramatic re-enactment staged in Canterbury Cathedral in 2009 by postgraduate students at the University of Kent.

Those interested in finding out more about medieval miracle accounts such as those of Benedict of Peterborough may consult Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadelphia, 2010) by Rachel Koopmans of Toronto’s York University.

¹ Edward O’Donoghue, The Story of Bethlehem Hospital from its Foundation in 1247 (London, 1914), p. 72.

² J.C. Robertson and J.B. Sheppard (eds.), Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, vol. II (London, 1876), pp. 208-209.

Images used with the kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury Cathedral

Windows onto the Past I

Reaching deep into the past for accounts of mental distress that were contemporary with Bethlem’s foundation for his published history of the Hospital, Bethlem’s early twentieth century chaplain Edward O’Donoghue discovered what he considered to be “two stories of acute mania” in Benedict of Peterborough’s account of miracles wrought at the tomb of Thomas á Becket in the years immediately following Becket’s 1170 martyrdom in Canterbury Cathedral. Both of these stories were captured in stained glass as well as in narrative, and we have gained the Cathedral’s permission to highlight the first of them in this post, and the second in one to follow.

O’Donoghue reports the chronicler as recording that “the mad Henry of Fordwich was dragged by his friends to the tomb [of Thomas] with his hands tied behind him, struggling and shouting, and there remained all day, but began to recover as the sun went down, and after a night spent in the church went home, perfectly well in his mind”.¹

There is a more economical, even poetic quality to the version of the story that adorns the stained glass version of this miracle: ‘Amens accedit; Orans sanusque recedit’ (‘He arrives out of his mind; he prays, and departs sane.’) There is nothing lyrical, however, about the scene these glass panels represent (described in more detail here). The clubs wielded by Henry’s ‘friends’ tell their own story; not of punishment per se, but rather of an attempt to administer the kind of “sharp sudden shock” to the body which, it has often been thought, would prompt the sufferer to “snap out of it” and “somehow rearrange the disordered mental mechanism into order again”.²

O’Donoghue’s rationalising commentary on this miracle makes fascinating reading. “The treatment of patients in the Middle Ages was not quite as absurd or inhuman as it may appear on first sight”, he writes. “The ducking of maniacs, their confinement in a church all night, and the use of ligatures and whips were calculated to exhaust their fury, and instil in them that sense of terror which tames a wild beast. In that condition of mind they were, I take it, more sensitive to the associations of a miracle-working shrine, and more ready to profit by the healing ministrations of time and nature.”³

It is equally interesting that Benedict of Peterborough does not appear to regard Henry of Fordwich as demoniacally possessed. He is simply ‘mad’, and the miracle-working power of Thomas’ shrine was as efficacious for him as it was for those with physical complaints. In this perceived continuum between ailments and treatment of mind and body, is it too fanciful to detect a proto-medical mindset within which may have been the seeds of the first biological psychiatry?

[to be continued]

¹ Edward O’Donoghue, The Story of Bethlehem Hospital from its Foundation in 1247 (London, 1914), p. 72.

² W.L. Jones, Ministering to Minds Diseased: A History of Psychiatric Treatment (London, 1983), p. 9.

³ O’Donoghue, op. cit., p. 72.

Both images used with the kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury Cathedral

A Clearer, Bluer Sky: Exhibition Opens Next Week

For almost 700 years, Bethlem Royal Hospital was situated in the heart of London; first of all in the City, at Bishopsgate and Moorfields, and finally just south of the River Thames at St George’s Fields.

In the early 1920s, the Governors decided to move the hospital to its present location on the Kent / Surrey borders, and purchased the Monks Orchard Estate. The hospital chaplain, Edward O’Donoghue, paid several visits to the site prior to the move and wrote about his visits for Bethlem’s magazine Under the Dome. He wrote: It was on a solitary day of sunshine in the midst of a week of rain that I adventured forth to catch a glimpse of the park, in Kent, upon which the fourth Bethlehem Hospital is to rise into a clearer, bluer sky.

This exhibition explores the conversion of the site from country estate to modern hospital through maps, archive photographs and art from the reserve collection of Bethlem’s Archives and Museum.

Exhibition details:

Opening Event (all welcome): 11 January 2012, 3 – 6pm
Exhibition continues: 12 January – 3 February
Opening times: Wed, Thurs, Friday, 11am – 6pm
Gallery & Museum open Saturday 14 January, 11am – 5pm

Address: The Bethlem Gallery, Bethlem Royal Hospital, Monks Orchard Road, Beckenham, Kent BR3 3BX
Nearest British Rail: Eden Park / East Croydon