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

handicapped105.
It was the continued admission, not only of 'idiotts', but also of 'sottish people w[hijch
are noe Lunatikes', to Bethiem, which provoked the Governors, in 1653, to introduce a require-
ment of certification to the hospital. Henceforth, 'noe Lunatike' was supposed to be 'taken
into ..Bethlem...unles the Doctor...first finde & reporte such p[erjson to bee a Lunatike'106.
Early modern usage of the term 'sot' was, of course, not so definitive as that of today, and
while contemporaries might indeed have meant someone 'stupefied by habitual drunkenness',
commonly the term was understood as equivalent to 'idiot'; as in the case of Sarah howard
of St. Dunstans in the West; who was described before Sessions as 'an Ideott and soe sottish
and void of reason that shee is not able to gett her Iiveing"° T; and applied without distinction.
Even if the Governors' use of the term in 1653 was mere tautology, the dividing line between
drunkenness and insanity was particularly thin during this period. Few contemporaries would
have disputed Donald Lupton's contention that 'a Drunkard is madde for the present but a
Madde man is drunke always"°8. While it was not until the nineteenth century that alcoholism
was itself recognised as a species of mental illness (e.g. of 'moral insanity' or 'monomania') or
linked etiologically to specific syndromes (e.g. delirium iremens), contemporaries had long found
its effects difficult to distinguish from the symptomatology of insanity, and excessive intake of
alcohol was almost invariably included as both an imitator, and a major cause, of insanity, in
the moral and medical treatises of the day 109 . This issue emerges only occasionally, however, as
a problem, in the Governors' Minutes, with individuals brought before the Bridewell Court as
'supposed to be drunke but appeareth to be somewhat craised', but one which was important
in that drunkenness was much more rarely accepted as an exculpation for offenses than lunacy,
105 See Table Ge & Haslam, Observations on Insanity, 112.
106 BCGM, 16 Nov. 1653, fol. 629.
107 GLRO MS LSM 44, 1 June 1674
108 London end the Cotntrey Carbonadoed, cli. 19, 75.
109 See Samuel Ward, Woe to Drnn*ard. (London, 1622); Richard Younge, The Drinkard's Character: or,
a Tree Drenkard with secl& Sinne. as Raigne en him... (London, 1638); John Brydall, Non Compos Mantis:
or, the Law relating to Natural Fools, Mad-Folks, and Lunatic Persons (London, 1700); George Cheyne, Essay
Of Health and Long Life, chap. ii, 'Of Meal & Drink'; Benjamin Rush, An Inquiry into the Eflects of Ardent
Spirits Upon the Human Body (1785); Thomas Trotter, An Essay, Medical, Philosophical, and Chemical, on
Drunkenness, and its Effect. on the Human Body (London, 3804), ad. Ry Porter (Tavistock Classics in the
History of Psychiatry: London, Routledge, 1988); Hunter & Macalpine, 300 Years of Psychiatry, 116-7, 264, 278,
436-7, 587-91.
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