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.
