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

Introduction
Chapter 2
Visiting
In delineating the scandalous environment of Bethiem the public visiting of its patients has stan-
dardly been portrayed by historians as the greatest scandal of all. It has now become almost a
historical platitude to exemplify the brutalising of the insane in the classical period by describ-
ing how Bethlem's patients were exhibtted, teased, ridiculed, provoked, abused, and otherwise
subjected to the 'impertinent curiosity of sightseers at a mere penny [or tuppence] a time' .
As zoo and freakshow, Bethlem has served 'as emblematic of an overriding cosmology of mad-
ness, whereby 'the madman in confinement was treated no better than a beast', or 'monster'2.
Accordingly, the curtailing of visiting there in 1770 has been seen as signalling the humanising
of the madman, his elevation from animal to patient, a profound disjunction from former at-
titudes, the product of a new 'Age of Sensibility', a kind of psychiatric peresiroika. While, in
the most general terms, this paradigm remains persuasive, in adopting it so unequivocally, some
historians have ignored (their own) prudent warnings against 'an overgenerahised and monolithic
interpretation of the asylum' 3 . Here it is largely a question of tone. The polemic of late eigh-
teenth and nineteenth century reformers, and of earlier protesters against public visiting, has to
some extent been assumed in the shocked tones of modern historians, and has led to distortions
and discrepancies in their accounts. While some historians accept that indiscriminate visiting
ceased in 1770, others claim that Bethiem displayed its inmates 'throughout the [eighteenth]
century', or 'at a time when such public shows had become unthinkable in post-Revolutionary
France'4 . In fact, more than 30 years after shows had (more or less) ended at Bethiem, they
were still being conducted at Charenton by Coulmier 5 . It is a gross exaggeration to say that
1 Scull, Maaesm,, 63.
2 Thid; Foucault, Madness, 70.
Digby, Madness, Morality and Medicine: A Slady of the York Retreat, 1796-1914 (Cambridge, CUP, 1985),
2 & 85.
Scull, Jthsersms, 63; Klaus Doerner, Madmen and the Boargeoisie: A Social Jluiory of Insanity and
Psychiatry, trans. J. Ncugroschel & i. Steinberg (Oxford, Basil Blacjcwell, 1981), 40.
Sunday displays continued at Bicétre until the Revolution; Foucaiilt, Madness, 68-69.
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