Bedlam: London and Its Mad - Brossura

Arnold, Catharine

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1847390005 ISBN 13: 9781847390004

Casa editrice: Simon & Schuster Ltd, 2009

Riassunto

The mad have always been with us. Bethlehem Hospital, or `Bedlam' as it became in cockney slang, is the world's oldest psychiatric hospital. Founded in 1247 it developed from a ramshackle hovel to the magnificent `Palace Beautiful', where visitors could pay to gawp at the chained inmates, through to the great Victorian hospital in Lambeth, now the Imperial War Museum.

Catharine Arnold takes us on a tour of Bedlam and examines London's attitude to madness along the way. We travel through the ages, from the barbaric `exorcisms' of the medieval period to the Tudor belief that a roast mouse, eaten whole, was the cure. We see the reforming zeal of eighteenth century campaigners and the development of the massive Victorian asylums. This was the era of the private madhouse, run by `traders in lunacy' who asked no questions and locked up insane and sane alike at the behest of greedy relatives. But it was also the age of the determined reformers who eventually made their way into Bedlam and exposed conditions of terrible deprivation and brutality.

`A finely written, thoroughly researched and humane book, packed with moving stories' Independent

`Smoothly written, densely researched...When you close this rewardingly informative and tastefully conceived book, you will be the richer for it' Sunday Express

Su questo libro

Recensione

‘Arnold has written a brilliant history not only of Bedlam, but of madness and the responses it has generated through the ages’ Waterstones Books Quarterly June issue
‘While Arnold searches for connections between the city and its asylum, she provides an anecdotal history of madness. Melancholy, for example, was considered the English disease. In the 18th century doctors discerned that it was caused by ‘self-abuse’, drinking too much tea and, according to one commentator, a combination of bad weather, beef, beer, the rigours of Nonconformity and the tedium of the English Sunday...The history of Bedlam reminds us of the terrible pains of madness and the continual failures of treatment and care. Science may have allowed us to understand the pathology of madness but do the ‘chemical cosh’ or ‘care in the community’ represent progress?’
Seven, Sunday Telegraph 10/8

‘London has rarely been kind to the insane. In medieval times, “therapy” for the unbalanced could mean anything from beatings and chains to solitary confinement and exorcism. The Saxons favoured porpoise-hide whips, the Romans a primitive form of trepanning (several skulls with tell-tale holes have been recovered from the Thames, some with bone tissue that suggests the patients may have survived their ghoulish operations).’
The Sunday Times 10/8

‘The mad are particularly with us in London – as anyone who has travelled the Northern Line will know – and Bedlam might seem the ideal prism with which to view the history of madness in the city where, as Shakespeare’s gravediggers tell Hamlet, “they are all as mad as he”...Bedlam history takes us from the ghoulish and ghastly early history of mental illness all the way to Care in the Community. There are unexpected cameos – the last “Bishop” of “Bethlam Hospital” before the Reformation was George Boleyn, benighted brother of Anne. There is a beautifully handled overview of the madness of George III...’
The Times 2/8

‘William Blake understood that industrialised London, a city of darkness inhabited by miserable, sickly natives and rootless migrants who had left their pastoral idylls for a life of hardship in overcrowded asylums, was enough to drive anyone to madness. In Catharine Arnold’s elegantly written and richly anecdotal study, it is salutary to learn that it was not until 1890 that the status of lunatics was changed, by Parliamentary legislation, from prisoners to patients...This is a thought-provoking book on a melancholy subject, with many parallels to the present. The mentally ill, like the poor, are always with us. The closure of asylums in the 1980s in favour of ‘care in the community’ proved disastrous. Many took to the streets, sleeping rough, as riddled with lice and despair as the medieval Bedlam beggar; others killed innocent citizens’
Daily Mail 8/8

‘Sympathetic and entertaining’
thelondonpaper 12/8
'What a dark undertow tugs away at the reader's imagination in this smoothly written, densely researched book. Remaining rigorously focused on her subject, historian and psychologist Arnold treads a sensitive path through eight of the most turbulent centuries in our country's development...Today, we wash our hands of the mentally afflicted as effectively as the favoured approach in 1247, which was whippings, chains and solitary confinement'
Sunday Express 17/8
Two-page feature
'What a dark undertow tugs away at the reader's imagination in this smoothly written, densely researched book. Remaining rigorously focused on her subject, historian and psychologist Arnold treads a sensitive path through eight of the most turbulent centuries in our country's development...Today, we wash our hands of the mentally afflicted as effectively as the favoured approach in 1247, which was whippings, chains and solitary confinement'
Sunday Express 17/8

‘Asylum seekers: There’s no shortage of competition for places in a chart of London’s maddest people. We asked Catharine Arnold, author of a brilliant new history of the capital’s treatment of its insane, to compile her personal top ten’
Time Out 21/8

'Catharine Arnold has not restricted herself to a narrow view of her subject. She has roved widely, and peppers her narrative with startling anecdotes and brief sketches of such characters as Henry Maudsley, "the gloomy genius of late Victorian psychiatry". Maudsley, who gave his name to the famous clinic across the road from King's College hospital in Camberwell, was a proponent of the view that insanity was hereditary, that it spelled the extinction of humanity, and that in the twilight of empire England had become the asylum of the world'
Guardian 23/8
‘This is a finely written, thoroughly researched and humane book, packed with moving stories. But its message is grim – how inhuman our treatment of the mad has been, and continues to be’
Independent 12/9
‘Fresh from writing about London’s dead in Necropolis, her new tale of madness interweaves the history of the Bethlam Hospital with that of changing attitudes towards the insane. Bethlam was mostly a ghastly place, home to the violent, the depressed and the simply dotty, such as Margaret Nicholson, who tried to kill George III with a cake knife’
The Times, 6/12
‘More than any other form of illness, madness has battled and beguiled society since earliest times...The death in 1815 of a sailor, James Norris, who had been shackled in chains for 14 years, prompted outrage and pledges of change. Only a few decades later, allegations of cruelty re-emerged when Ann Morley was revealed to have slept naked on straw and been hosed down with freezing water...As mental illness remains an enigma, Arnold’s anecdotal book provides a lively and moving guided tour through 750 years of London’s “mad”’
The Times 1/8
‘The mad have always been with us but how they have been treated has changed through the ages. This 750-year history of Bedlam, London’s Bethlehem mental hospital, exposes the conditions and treatments that the insane have endured since its foundation in 1247. An informative and thought-provoking read’
Express 31/7
‘More than any other form of illness, madness has battled and beguiled society since earliest times...The death in 1815 of a sailor, James Norris, who had been shackled in chains for 14 years, prompted outrage and pledges of change. Only a few decades later, allegations of cruelty re-emerged when Ann Morley was revealed to have slept naked on straw and been hosed down with freezing water...As mental illness remains an enigma, Arnold’s anecdotal book provides a lively and moving guided tour through 750 years of London’s “mad”’
The Times 1/8
‘The mad have always been with us but how they have been treated has changed through the ages. This 750-year history of Bedlam, London’s Bethlehem mental hospital, exposes the conditions and treatments that the insane have endured since its foundation in 1247. An informative and thought-provoking read’
Express 31/7
‘Madness, says Catharine Arnold, “runs like a watermark through the history of London”. Skulls found in the Thames show the Romans drilled holes into the heads of the afflicted; some even survived. Bethlehem Hospiatl (aka Bethlem, or Bedlam in the local argot) was founded in Bishopsgate in 1247. From the star, it had a reputation for degeneracy and corruption; by the 17th century, it was “a byword for pandemonium” and a place of “horror and chaos”. Writers from Shakespeare to Swift visited in search of inspiration, as did artists (notably Hogarth), and for many years it was a must-see tourist destination...A very readable popular history of how madness has figured in the life of the capital’
Guardian, 15/8
‘In crisp prose, she guides us through Bedlam’s transformation from nightmarish “whips, gags, manacles, straitjackest, chains” to “female wards...[that] could be mistaken for the drawing room of a ladies’ club”. She also charts the stereotyping of madness as the melancholy young man of the 17th century becomes the Victorian madwoman in the attic (and elsewhere), when belief held that “merely to be in possession of a cervix predisposed one to insanity.”’
Observer 30/8

L'autore

Catharine Arnold's previous books include Necropolis: London and its Dead, the first of her London trilogy.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Simon & Schuster Ltd
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1847390005
• ISBN 13: 9781847390004
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 306