"The rest of the story you can fill up, sir, for yourself, and without my assistance you can imagine how it was that, while in a state of extreme exhaustion, and deeming myself dead, I heard my sister, in a strong agony of sorrow and self-reproach, say to my nurse, 'Oh, dear friend—dear good nurse—if you have a sister, don't treat her, as I did Abigail, with suspicion and wicked passion; for should you, all the light speeches of your frowardness will return to you, and lie heavy on your heart when hers shall beat no more.'"
CHAPTER XXVI.
MEDICAL BUILDINGS.
The medical buildings of London are seldom or never visited by the sight-seers of the metropolis. Though the science and art of nursing have recently been made sources of amusement to the patrons of circulating libraries, the good sense and delicacy of the age are against converting the wards of an hospital into galleries for public amusement. In the last century the reverse was the case. Fashionable idlers were not indeed anxious to pry into the mysteries of Bartholomew's, Guy's, and St. Thomas's hospitals; for a visit to those magnificent institutions was associated in their minds with a risk of catching fevers or the disfiguring small-pox. But Bethlehem, devoted to the entertainment and cure of the insane, was a favourite haunt with all classes. "Pepys," "The London Spy," "The Tatler," and "The Rake's Progress," give us vivid pictures of a noisy rout of Pall Mall beaus and belles, country fly-catchers, and London scamps, passing up and down the corridors of the great asylum, mocking its unhappy inmates with brutal jests, or investigating and gossiping about their delusions and extravagances with unfeeling curiosity. Samuel Johnson enlivened himself with an occasional stroll amongst the lunatics, just as he periodically indulged himself with witnessing a hanging, a judicial flogging, or any other of the pleasant spectacles with which Hogarth's London abounded. Boswell and he once strolled through the mansions of the insane; and on another occasion, when he visited the same abode with Murphy, Foote, and Wedderburne (afterwards Lord Loughborough), the philosopher's "attention was arrested by a man who was very furious, and who, while beating his straw, supposed it was William, Duke of Cumberland, whom he was punishing for his cruelties in Scotland in 1746." Steele, when he took three schoolboys (imagine the glee of Sir Richard's schoolboy friends out with him for a frolic) in a hackney coach to show them the town, paid his respects to "the lions, the tombs, Bedlam, and the other places, which are entertainments to raw minds because they strike forcibly on the fancy." In the same way Pepys "stept into Bedlam, and saw several poor miserable creatures in chains, one of whom was mad with making verses," a form of mental aberration not uncommon in these days, though we do not deem it necessary to consign the victims of it to medical guardianship.
The original Bethlehem hospital was established by Henry VIII., in a religious house that had been founded in 1246, by Simon Fitz-Mary, Sheriff of London, as an ecclesiastical body. The house was situated at Charing-cross, and very soon the king began to find it (when used for the reception of lunatics) disagreeably near his own residence. The asylum was therefore removed, at a "cost nigh £17,000," to Bishopgate Without, where it remained till 1814, and the inmates were removed to the present noble hospital in St. George's Fields, the first stone of which was laid April 18th, 1812.
One of the regulations of old Bedlam has long since been disused. The harmless lunatics were allowed to roam about the country with a tin badge—the star of St. Bethlehem—on the right arm. Tenderness towards those to whom the Almighty has denied reason is a sentiment not confined to the East. Wherever these poor creatures went they received alms and kindly entreatment. The ensign on the right arm announced to the world their lamentable condition and their need of help, and the appeal was always mercifully responded to. Aubrey thus describes their appearance and condition:—
"Till the breaking out of the Civil Wars Tom o' Bedlams did travel about the country. They had been poor distracted men, but had been put into Bedlam, where recovering some soberness, they were licentiated to go a-begging, i. e. they had on their left arm an armilla of tin, about four inches long; they could not get it off. They wore about their necks a great horn of an ox in a string of baudry, which, when they came to an house for alms, they did wind, and they did put the drink given them into this horn, whereto they did put the stopple. Since the wars I do not remember to have seen any one of them."
The custom, however, continued long after the termination of the Civil War. It is not now the humane practice to label our fools, so that society may at once recognise them and entertain them with kindness. They still go at large in our public ways. Facilities are even given them for effecting an entrance into the learned professions. Frequently they are docketed with titles of respect, and decked with the robes of office. But however gratifying this plan may be to their personal vanity it is not unattended with cruelty. Having about them no external mark of their sad condition, they are often, through carelessness and misapprehension—not through hardness of heart—chastised with undue severity. "Poor Tom, thy horn is dry," says Edgar, in "Lear." Never may the horn of mercy be dry to such poor wretches!