# Bethlem Royal Hospital · The Cult Dossier · The Atlas · The Congregation of Tomorrow

Source: https://congregationoftomorrow.org/atlas/library/cults/153-bethlem-royal-hospital/ · The Congregation of Tomorrow · the Atlas · language: en
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The Cult Dossier · No. 153 · Psychiatry / The Asylum
Bethlem Royal Hospital
Bedlam; the Priory of St Mary of Bethlehem
1247 – present · London, England
XV. THE ASYLUM — WHEN MEDICINE DECIDED WHOSE MIND WAS WRONG
Founded as a religious house and still bearing its name; the medical institution is secular.
### Who led it
### What it worshipped and taught
### Who was in it
### How it ended, or where it stands
### The dead
### Of note
### Its timeline
- 1247 Founded as the Priory of the New Order of Our Lady of Bethlehem, just outside London's wall at Bishopsgate, on property given by the alderman SIMON FITZMARY. A religious house, not a hospital.
- 1403 THE FIRST DEFINITE RECORD OF INSANE PATIENTS: a visitation finds six men described as mente capti, deprived of reason. How the house became a madhouse before that is undocumented.
- 1676 Moves to a grand new building at MOORFIELDS designed by ROBERT HOOKE — a palace frontage over cells, widely mocked at the time as a facade.
- 17th–18th c. VISITORS. The hospital admitted the public, with a collection box at the entrance, and the poor box brought in hundreds of pounds a year until visiting was curtailed in 1770. THE POPULAR IMAGE OF PAYING SPECTATORS BAITING THE MAD IS CONTESTED. Visiting and donation are documented; the historian JONATHAN ANDREWS has argued at length against reading early modern Bethlem as a simple zoo, and against treating it as the nadir of psychiatric history. THIS FILE RECORDS THE PRACTICE AND THE DISPUTE, and resolves neither.
- 1814–1815 JAMES NORRIS. In April 1814 EDWARD WAKEFIELD finds a former American marine, held at Bethlem since 1800, chained by an iron collar to a metal rod and kept that way for more than ten years. The image is printed and circulated. Norris dies on 26 FEBRUARY 1815, weeks after his release. A HOUSE OF COMMONS SELECT COMMITTEE reports in July 1815; in 1816 the physician THOMAS MONRO resigns and the apothecary JOHN HASLAM is dismissed.
- 1815 Moves to St George's Fields, Southwark — the building now housing the Imperial War Museum.
- 1930 Moves to Monks Orchard, Beckenham, where it remains.
- Present Operating in the London Borough of Bromley within the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, alongside the BETHLEM MUSEUM OF THE MIND, which holds the hospital archive and patient art.
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