The word bedlam comes from Bethlehem Royal Hospital, founded in London in 1247 under King Henry III. After Turkish forces took Bethlehem in 1244, bishop-elect Goffredo de Prefetti lost his income and persuaded alderman and former sheriff Simon FitzMary to donate property outside the city wall for the Priory of the New Order of Our Lady of Bethlehem, an alms collection house whose brethren wore a star on their cloaks. The first record of insane patients dates to 1403, when inspectors found six men described as mente capti along with manacles, chains, locks, and stocks. Edward III seized it during the Hundred Years’ War, Henry VIII handed it to the City of London in 1547, and from 1557 it ran under Bridewell, with grocers and drapers as keepers pocketing the profits.

King James I appointed the Cambridge anatomist Helkiah Crooke in 1619, but he and his steward sold donated food back to inmates, and by 1631 patients were starving. The Monro family ran the medicine for 125 years using humoral theory, and Robert Hooke’s palatial Moorfields building of 1676 drew paying tourists until 1770. In 1814 Quaker reformer Edward Wakefield exposed the abuse, leading to an 1815 inquiry and moral management.

• How the hospital’s location beside London playhouses put Bedlam into Jacobean drama like The Duchess of Malfi and The Changeling
• Humoral treatments of cold baths, bloodletting, blisters, purgatives, and a lowering diet with no fruit or vegetables
• Caius Gabriel Cibber’s statues of melancholy and raving madness on a building sinking into an old city ditch
• American Marine James Norris, held about a decade in an iron harness with a ring riveted around his neck
• The 1815 Southwark building that now houses the Imperial War Museum, the 1930 move to Monks Orchard, and the 1997 Reclaim Bedlam protest