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

there was an acute awareness of the susceptibility of society to afflictions, whether economic or
social, bodily or mental and substantial recognition of insanity as a natural, although deplorable,
consequence of calamity—particularly, when calamity involved an extreme material or emotional
dislocation. The Bethiem Board was well disposed to those who had experienced 'great losses
by fire' or other misfortune, granting a number of mitigations for patients, for example, after
the Great Fire of London36 . Anne Marshall was admitted to the hospital in 1667 at a weekly
charge of just 2/ to her son-in-law, he being 'but a Journeyman Joyner and haveing a wife and
a child to mainteyne', and she being 'an aged woeman...fallen distracted by the late lamentable
fire in London and !osse of her house and goods'37. Indeed, the frequency with which lunacy,
throughout the period, was ascribed to calamity by contemporaries, has been underestimated by
historians, It is a conception of insanity that may be found in writers from Burton to Smollett
and Haslam (the l3ethlem Apothecary), and helped to contribute a softer balance to some of
the more negative attitudes towards insanity as reprehensible. In his 'Table of the Causes of
Insanity', compiled from the notebooks of the Bethiem Apothecary, John Gozna, on admissions
to Bethlem during 1772-87, William Black presented 'Misfortunes, Troubles, Disappointments
[and] Grief' as, by far, the most common cause of patients' insanity, accounting for almost a
quarter of all known causesas.
The Governors occasionally made their sympathy for the plight of both obligors and patients
more explicit, as in the case of Anne Urring, 'a young maiden', whose mother, Joan, 'a poore
Minister's Widdow...whoe bath nothing...but what shee getteth by her hard Labour and the
Charity of good people', was granted an abatement in 1672, on the 'Courte com[m]iserating the
sad condicon both of Mother and Daughter'39. Nor is there a great deal of evidence of this
36 Thtd, e.g. 25 Sept., 19 Dec. 1666, 25 Jan., 26 April, 10 July & 20 Oct. 1667, fols & 236-7; GLRO LSM.26,
12 Oct. 1667; cases of John Felgate, Thomas Beasely, Elizabeth Hazeler, John Felgate, Mary Sharpe & John
Norton. See, also, the case of Edward Phillips, pennitted to remain in Bethiem at the abated weekly feeof 2/,
after Sir Benjamin Rudyerd had pleaded on behalf of his brother-in-law, 'lately disabled by the troubles of the
times [i.e. the Civil War] to contribute towards the said charge'; ,6id, 28 May 1644, fol. 114.
mid, 12 June 1667, fol. 49.
Black, Dis,e,lation on !naanili,, 18-19.
Ibid, 22 Nov. 1672, fol 459. See, also, the case, of the sister of Mary Weekes who wa, granted an abatement
and the cancellation of her arrears for the patient's keeping, in 1672, oat appealing to the Governors 'with Tearea
in her Eyes'; Daniel Cardenell, discharged recovered from Bethlem in 1674, after a 15 month spell, but relapsing,
was readmitted on the petition of 3 merchant, & governors, who 'comiserating his sad Condic[ijon' were 'willing
to raise & pay £50 for his keepeing in...Bethlem soe long as bee shall cont tine distracted or shall live that bee
may no perish'; & Elizabeth Hall, who was ordered kept 'on the sole charge of the...hospital', on her sister (?),
Margaret, a servant maid, testifying to her poverty, the Court declaring the same...a Case of great pity and
compassion'; ilid, 4 April 1672, 22 Jan. 1675 & 9 Feb. 1683, fda 386, 92 & 350-51.
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