Queen Mary and Westfield College London University PhD Thesis ...

charged if their securities failed to provide them with clothing without 'a Sufficient Excuse'44.
Bethiem's provision for clothing was not confined to patients under cure. In 1768, the Steward
was instructed by the Committee to 'provide all the Incurable Women Patients in this hospital
with Two Aprons in Case their friends do not provide the same' 45 . (Evidently, proper attire
was already regarded as more important for female patients than for males, although, no doubt,
patients would themselves have agreed with this verdict, as they d d rather more emphatically
in the 'domesticated' asylums of the nineteenth century 46). As oul ned earlier, part of the hos-
pital's after care had, since the early seventeenth century, comprised the furnishing of apparel
to patients on their discharge, and Tyson's Gift consolidated this casual charity into a much
more extensive system of relief after 1708. Indeed, the Governor's efforts somewhat contradict
the philosophy so associated with Bethiem of curing the insane by 'hard usage', or 'the ordi-
nary discipline of the place'. Patients' 'diet' was indeed 'slender, their clothing coarse, their
beds hard, and their handling [often] severe and rigid', as Thomas Willis preached it should
be, in the latter seventeenth century. Yet this was partly a result of lack of funds and failure
to fulfil the ideals of provision, on the part of the hospital, its pat.rons and its clients, as well
as of a prevailing attitude to the insane as brutes and an accordingly brutal policy of care and
therapy47. Furthermore, Willis's was not the timeless icon of Augustan medical opinion that
historians have tended to take it for 48 . As early as the 1740s, practitioners were already offering
contrary prescriptions, and declaring that the 'beds' of frenzied patients 'ought to be Soft'49.
By the period of Thomas Weston's Stewardship (1713-34), all patients' bedding and the
great majority of their clothing was being furnished by the Steward, at fixed prices; the former,
'on their admission', and the latter, 'as occasion requires' 50. Appendix 3b, which itemises the
prices and composition of Bethiem bedding and apparel in 1749, demonstrates not only how
SLHCM, e.g. 29 May 1761, case of Mary Samm.
BSCM, 16 Jan. 1768.
46 See Showaher, Female Malady, 84-5, where she discusses the significance of female dress and personal
appearance for Victorian alienists and women patients themselves (e.g. when having their photographs taicen).
See Willis, Soal of Brsies, 206.
48 Indeed, it seems odd and revealing, despite the undeniable (though insuffiwently gauged), influence of
Willis'. writings upon 'eighteenth-century discussions of insanity', that Scull should cite Willis's 1684 treatise as
his primary exeinplum. See Scull, Soc,al Order/Mental Disorder, 57.
Frings, Treatise, 45.
See 1&ed, 22 Jan. 1734, loIs 324-5.
145