Bedlam (Bethlem Royal Hospital)

London’s asylum for the insane — and a tourist attraction where you could pay a penny to watch them suffer.

History

Bethlem Royal Hospital dates to 1247, originally a priory. It started taking in “distracted” patients by the 1400s. The name corrupted to “Bedlam” in common speech and became a synonym for chaos and madness that outlasted the institution itself.

The old building in Bishopsgate was replaced in 1676 with a grand new structure in Moorfields, designed by Robert Hooke. The new Bedlam looked impressive from outside — modeled on the Tuileries Palace — but conditions inside were grim. Patients were chained, beaten, starved, and subjected to “treatments” like bleeding and purging that made things worse.

The Penny Show

Visiting Bedlam was popular entertainment. For a penny, anyone could walk in and stare at the inmates. The hospital actually depended on this revenue. Estimates suggest 96,000 visits a year in the early 1700s. The practice wasn’t banned until 1770.

This wasn’t just cruelty for sport — though it was that too. It reflected an era that drew the line between reason and madness differently than we do, and often drew it in the wrong place.

In the Novel

Daniel Waterhouse visits Bedlam, and the place resonates with the novel’s persistent interest in the boundary between brilliance and madness. Newton’s obsessive intensity, the alchemical fixations of otherwise rational men, the fine line between natural philosophy and delusion — Bedlam is the dark endpoint of that spectrum. When the smartest people in England are grinding up metals to find the Philosopher’s Stone, who exactly belongs in the asylum?