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Bedlam

London's Hospital for the Mad

Paul Chambers author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:The History Press Ltd

Published:29th Nov '19

Should be back in stock very soon

Bedlam cover

Bethlem Hospital is the oldest mental institution in the world, to many famously known as ‘Bedlam’: a chaotic madhouse that brutalised its patients. Paul Chambers explores the 800-year history of Bethlem and reveals fascinating details of its ambivalent relationship with London and its inhabitants, the life and times of the hospital’s more famous patients, and the rise of a powerful reform movement to tackle the institution’s notorious policies. Here the whole story of Bethlem Hospital is laid bare to a new audience, charting its well-intended beginnings to its final disgrace and reform.

"Paul Chambers has illuminated some very murky places. His portraits of those in power in the world of Bedlam, and some of their pitiful charges, give a welcome human scale to this fascinating and wide-ranging survey, from monasteries to madhouses, lunatic asylums to the NHS. I am profoundly glad that my sanity was not questioned between 1728 and 1855."

-- Liza Pi

ISBN: 9780750991483

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

320 pages