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…a rod is for the back of him
that is void of understanding.
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Proverbs 10:13
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According to Christians, lunatics were possessed by unclean
spirits. To effect a cure it was therefore necessary to dislodge
the offending spirit. This idea derived from gospel stories
of exorcisms.
And there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit;
and he cried out , Saying, Let us alone; what have we to do
with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth? art thou come to destroy
us? I know thee who thou art, The Holy One of God. And Jesus
rebuked him, saying, Hold thy peace, and come out of him.
Mark 1:23-25
Such beliefs had at least two unfortunate consequences. The
first was that for many centuries no advance was made in understanding
the nature of mental illness — although it is clear that
Christians did understand the there was such a thing as insanity*.
The second was that many thousands of men, women and children,
already burdened with madness, were confined in chains and subjected
to routine torture. The idea was that by making the environment
sufficiently uncomfortable, the torturers might induce the possessing
spirit to leave its human host. In some monasteries, the monks
whipped their insane charges regularly every day. Although the
method was spectacularly unsuccessful, no one seems to have
realised the fact for many centuries. Sometimes the insane were
beaten out of the parish with quarterstaffs. Sometimes they
were loaded onto ships and sent off to die or become a problem
for someone else. This is the origin of the various popular
tales about a "ship of fools".
For as long as the Church controlled the insane, they endured
dreadful torments. They were imprisoned, chained to a wall (or
if they were lucky to a bed), flogged, starved, insulted, tortured,
immersed in iced water and otherwise brutalised. It also seems
safe to assume that sexual abuse would have been commonplace
in view of twentieth century disclosures about monasteries,
seminaries, church schools, orphanages and state mental asylums.
Throughout Christendom the insane were kept in insanitary conditions
in mad-houses and exposed to public ridicule. The most famous
place in England for such people was the hospital of St Mary
of Bethlehem ("Bedlam"), where visitors were charged
a fee to see the inmates, and were allowed to provoke them and
laugh at them. A few inmates came to their senses, some died
of old age, some died of neglect, starvation, exposure or torture,
and many died of "putrid fever" or other infectious
diseases that flourished in such conditions.
The Christian Church fiercely opposed the idea that insanity
might have a physical cause, since it knew for a fact that it
was attributable to evil spirits, and the Bible confirmed that
beating was the correct treatment:
A whip for the horse, a bridle for the ass, and a rod for
the fool's back.
Proverbs 26:3
In practice, Christian mental asylums were often used as prisons.
Anyone that the Church did not like, or did not approve of,
could be imprisoned without trial in an asylum, and then tortured
and abused at will. Victims ranged from critics of Church excesses
(including political radicals and atheists) to unmarried mothers,
as well as the genuinely insane.
The insane were not only a source of public entertainment,
they were also an object lesson as to where immorality could
lead. In France the devout Parisian bourgeoisie enjoyed Sunday
excursions to Bicêtre to watch the insane perform tricks.
By flicking a whip an attendant would make them dance and perform
acrobatics like monkeys at a circus. For churchmen the main
problem was not to reform such institutions, but to ensure that
they were used to deliver the correct moral message to the spectators.
Here is the Abbé Desmonceaux writing on National
Benevolence in 1789 describing his idea of an asylum that
could be used to illustrate the effects of immorality:
The sight of these shadowy places and the guilty creatures
they contain is well calculated to preserve from the same
acts of just reprobation the deviations of a too licentious
youth; it is thus prudent of mothers and fathers to familiarize
their children at an early age with these horrible and detestable
places, where shame and turpitude fetter crime, where man
corrupted in his essence, often loses forever the rights he
had acquired in society*.
The Church lost its power in France soon afer this, during
the French Revolution, and mad-houses soon became a thing of
the past. A wide range of abuses ended as a direct result of
the Declaration of the Rights of Man: "No man
may be arrested or detained except in the cases determined by
law and according to the forms therein prescribed…The
law must permit only the penalties strictly and evidently necessary....
". By a decree of 1790 the insane who had been confined
in religious houses, houses of correction and elsewhere were
to be examined by a magistrate to establish whether they really
were mad. Those who were not mad were to be released and those
who were mad were to be transferred to hospital*.
Humane treatment of the insane was pioneered in France, by Philippe
Pinel, appointed to the asylum at Bicêtre in 1793 under
the new secular government. One of his first acts was to remove
the chains from the inmates
In Britain the idea of a proper hospital or asylum, as opposed
to the traditional mad-house, was introduced by William Tuke,
a Quaker, who founded a retreat near York in 1794. The institution
was more like a farm with a great walled garden than a prison.
There were no grilles or bars on the windows, and like Pinel,
Tuke removed the chains from his patients. By the early nineteenth
century Parliament was investigating the Bethlehem Hospital
and its traditional practices. In 1815, for one penny it was
still possible each Sunday to watch the insane perform their
tricks to the insults and mocking laughter of the devout*.
Secular ideas triumphed in the nineteenth century. Abuses were
suppressed as the Churches lost their influence, and soon people
were asking in wonder how it could be that previously "No
one blushed to put the insane in prison"*.
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