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

themselves, who attended periodically 'to bring clean, or take away foul Linnen from them in
Bethlem". While this lends further testimony to the openness of the environment of the early
modern hospital and of Bethiem in particular, so divided a responsibility may have prolonged
tile periods that patients were left unchanged, in filthy clothing. The employment of laundry
women at Bethiem by (at least) the 1760s must have improved the cleanliness of clothing and
bedding' 35. Parish records also document, on occasion, the washing of parishioners' clothing
on their admission to Bethlem and to other city hospitals, although, thereafter, parishes almost
invariably relied on the hospital to wash their members' clothes' 36 . Patients themselves were
regularly employed in the laundering and cleaning work at the hospital, and the Stewards Ac-
counts reveal much about such activities which is absent from the ordinary minutes 137. The
eyes of public visitors upon the hospital also operated, if in a rather limited way, as a spur to
cleanliness. The panegyrical Bethiem. A Poem, allegedly written 'By a Patient' and sold as a
broadside to visitors in the 17405138, advertised that:-
The Beds and Bedding are both warm and clean,
Which to each Corner may be plainly seen
Thomas Bowen was claiming the same thing, however, forty years later, when public visiting
had been curtailed' 39 . Indeed, on the contrary, it was with the decline of the public's surveil-
lance of Bethiem that cleanliness emerged as a real priority at the hospital. Calls for hygiene
grew more insistent, not merely out of developing theories concerning the generation of putrid
distempers, but alongside a growing sensibility and insistence upon outward decorum, which
began to challenge former assumptions that the squalid conditions of the poor, sick and insane
were unavoidable, or even appropriate, and sought to impose cleanliness as (next to godliness)
134 Ibid, 27 Jan. 1742, fol. 135.
It is not ckar when exactly washer women first arrive on the scene at Bethlem. The first reference to them
located, thus far, is not until 1765, but there is no doubt that they had been working at the hospital for some
time before this. See ibid, 20 June 1765, fol. 135.
136 See e.g. case of Joan Malliott of S. Botolph Bishopagete whose 'linnen' was washed at a cost of 5/ to the
cht,rdiwardens on her entry into Bethiem in 1687; G1&alI MS 455/7, loIs 60 & 123-4.
137 See in/re, 'occupation'.
i:
See appendix 4a
Bowen, Jiteforicel Accoant, 9.
164