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

Introduction
Chapter 5
The Rule of 'Sky-Coloured Coats':
Inferior Officers and Servants
Nursing staff have always been at the front line of medical provision and constituted the
functioning heart of the hospital. Indeed, one may argue that, in terms of patients' experience
of illness and incarceration, the hospital attendant represents a much more important area of
study than its medical staff. This pertains particularly in the early modern period and at early
modern Bethlem, prior to the introduction of case notes and prior to the imposition of the radical,
interventionist, methods of treatment which characterised nineteenth century psychiatry, when
and where medical men intervened so little in patients' lives. It was attendants who normally
administered the medicaments which medical officers dispensed. The inferior officers and keepers
of Bethlem were much closer, in respect of social class, culture and the nature of their duties,
to the patient population, than either the practitioners or the governing administrators of the
hospital. They considerably (and increasingly, as the period progressed) shared the existence
and environment of patients; were required to submit to an analogous form of confinement; to
reside, sleep and eat, continually within the hospital walls; they caught the same diseases and
were often buried in the same graveyards'; the vast majority of their social interaction was with
patients and their interests and frustrations centred on patients; occasionally, staff even married
patients. Moreover, as patients themselves, like James Carkesse and Urbane Metcalf, agreed,
it was not medical men or governors who ruled the roost and determined the tone of patients'
lives at the hospital, nor even was it the movements of the planets, moon or stars; rather, it was
'th' Azure of [the] sky-colour'd Coats' of the attendants2.
See burial register of St. Botolph Bishopagate, London, which gives details of buriale of patients & staff at
Bethlem Churchyard; GzildF,eIl MSS 4515/1, 4515/2, 4515/4, 4516/i & 4516/2, burials 1559-1717. E.g. '1605
[aged) 53 John Pewtle (Perotte?] keep[erJ of bethlem howse ye 22 of maya'; '24 May 1657 Izack [Isaac) Mount
[Bethleni Porter 1654-7] [aged) 46'. Staff were also frequently married and had their children beptised/buried at
the local Bishopsgate church. E.g. '11 May 1662 Wiliam Godbid [Hethiem Steward 1658-63] & Audrey Jackson
p(er) Licence'; '13 June 1632 A Stilborn Dau(ghter] of Issick [Isaacl lovell [sacked Bethiem Steward)'. With the
move to Moorfields, burial g of patients, staff and their families, are recorded more regularly in the registers of
St. Stephen Coleman Street, but staff seem more often to be distinguished from patients by burial in the church,
rather than in the common churchyard; Giiildhall MSS 4449/2 & 4451, burials 1636-1812. E.g. '13 Nov. 1690
J(oh]n Carter Steward of Bedlam (1663-90] Buryed in ye Church'; fol. 4, '8 Dec. 1690 Elizabeth Wile of J[oh)n
Greene [basketman 1683-93] Buryed in ye Church 1690'; fol. 14, '21 Oct. 1693 Richard Fancourt [basketman
1682-93] dyed in Bedlam'. William Birch, Bethiem Steward 1734-48, however, actually stipulated in his will that
he should be buried in the diurchyard on the north gide of the Coleman Street church at 'as small Expence as
may be w[i]th Decency'; see P.C.C. Prob. 11/762, q.n. 171, fols 211-12.
2 James Carlcese, Lsctda Intervslla, 34 & pessmrn; Urbane Metcalf, The Interior of Bethlehem hospital.
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