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

earthly, medical means. Moreover, what Macdonald failed to address was that it was primarily
female religious activity that was being negated by this taint of insanity, and, indeed, being
given an emotional outlet by nonconformist preachers. Black's was a verdict and prejudice that
was reiterated, and applied most emphatically to the case of female patients, by a wide range of
visitors to the eighteenth century hospital, as also by a wide range of contemporary medical and
religious treatises 293. While male revivalist preachers were held fundamentally to blame by the
orthodox Anglican elite for fermenting such hysteria, it was their female followers who were being
rounded up and committed to Bethlem. As female minds had long been conceived as weaker, less
rational, more susceptible to seduction, so those female devotees who gave vent to uncontrolled
spiritual outbursts, who claimed to have 'seen and been talking with' their 'dear Christ' were
particularly likely to be conceived as merely deranged, their 'ignorance and indisposition' taken
'advantage...of' by male preachers 294 . Just as the human mind was increasingly seen as incapable
of dealing with the complexities of providence and the imaginary torments of the hereafter,
the female mind was regarded as especially liable to be undone by its enhanced imaginative
powers and, contrariwise, its peculiar frailty of judgment 295 . Nor was it simply accidental that
enthusiastic madness was couched in the language of sexual seduction. Denying and fearing
the undercurrents of confused feminine sexuality that lay behind such passionate yearnings
for Christ, husbands who saw their wives transformed and traumatised by their contacIt with
revivalism; and orthodox anglican clerics, who felt their rational and reserved notions of rhgious
and social propriety invaded, preferred to see such behaviour as representative of insanity alone.
Results of admission: cure, discharge and relapse; rhetoric and reality
At face value the results of admissions to Bethlem would seem thoroughly to contradict the
negative impression of its record held by some historians. In nine annual reports I have surveyed
published from 1681-1705, Bethlem claimed a cure rate of between 57% and 82% of the numbers
of patients whose adiiiissions had some result over the same period, or between 31% anal 63%
of the total patient population. Averaged out over the entire period, these figures give mean
percentage cure rates of 71% and 34% respectively. During 1682, the Court of Governors'
293 See e.g. von Ia Roche, Sophie in London, & chap. 2; WiIi&n Pargeter, Observations (1792), ad. Ja&aon;
M. J. Naylor, The Insanity end Mischief of Vilgar Sruperstiftons (Cambridge, 1795); Thomas Church, Reingrks
on the Reverend Mr. John Wesley's Last Jovrnal (London, 1745); Thomas Evans, The History of Modern
Enthssiasm (2nd edn; London, 1757); George Lavinglon, The Enthvs,esm of Methodists end Papists Coenpered
(London, 1757).
294 m,, 31-7.
295 Ibtd, 31.
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