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

Naturally, attendance was healthier in some periods than in others at Bethlem. The 1690s
was an especially insalubrious period for the Bethlem lay staff, with almost every one of its male
members suffering from debilitating illness and frailty. The 1720s/30s too, were punctuated
by a good deal of illness amongst both the servants and the patients, exacerbated by a fleeting
bout of smallpox at the hospital. At least with the appointment of a nurse in 1695, sick servants
(like sick patients) appear to have been more assiduously (if, also, more exorbitantly) tended229.
Yet lack of provision for staff sickness could cause real problems in the efficient running of the
hospital. When, due to the Steward's indisposition in 1696, for example, no-one was available
to receive money owing for Margaret Ilebb's maintenance in Bethlem, her mother was put to
considerable inconvenience and the patient's discharge refused and delayed unnecessarily by the
Committee230.
General Conduct
There is much to confirm the traditional account of an enduring low standard of nursing
at Bethlem, of exploitative and neglectful servants, in the Governors' Minutes. One discovers
the same abuses occurring again and again, in the face of repeated orders and exhortations of
reform from the Governors' Courts and Committees. The misappropriation of funds, misuse
of provisions and cruelty of fifteenth and sixteenth century masters/keepers and their deputies,
finds a more explicit reflection in the better documented complaints against stewards, porters,
matrons, basketmen and maidservants, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Much of
this, in the early period of Bethlem's history, is attributable to the indiscriminate granting
of the Mastership by the Crown (or the City) as a reward. In early modern times, under
the governorship of Bridewell, Bethlem suffered under a lack of thorough supervision, from
an unwieldy administration with too many commitments and too little time, which too often
left staff to their own devices. During the seventeenth century, in particular, the Court Books
their treatment. Increasingly, in practice, however, officers (like servants) seem to have got away with most of the
costs of their illnesses, even when they failed to acquire the necessary authorisation of treatment from the Court.
The standing method adopted in 1699 for treating staff, nevertheless, exduded officers from any entitlement to
provision. For controversy over medical officers' fees for the lay staff of both hospitals, see e.g. ,&id, 12 & 27 July
1677, 25 Jan. 1678, 12 Sept. 1684, 6 Feb., 3 June, 3 & 14 July 1685, 15 June 1686, 15 April 1687, 11 Jan., 10
& 24 May 1689, 11 April 1690, 7 July 1693, 30 April & 26 Nov. 1697, fols 401-2, 4, 5, 34, 76, 88, 90, 138, 235-6,
353, 398, 405, 36, 253, 106 & 150. For the Governors' resolution, See ibid, 17 Nov. 1699, fol. 326-7.
229 The basketmen, John/Wiliam Green, Richard Mills & Samuel Steers; the Steward, Thomas Yates, & the
Porter, Francis Wood, were all ailing between 1693 & 1697. See .bid, 28 July 1693, 28 June 1695, 18 Dec. 1696 &
26 Feb., 30 April & 26 Nov. 1697, loIs 260, 458, 81, 94 & 150. For the sickness & nursing of servants & patients
in the eighteenth century, see BSA, pasasm.
230 Th,d, 18 Dec. 1696, fol. 81.
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