Bedlam (8 page)

Thus ended my second interview with the governors’ subcommittee of Bethlem Hospital.

Later, walking home, my mind running the event over and over, as it will do, never quite sure whether for tips to better conduct next time or for proof the course of action it came up with was a model for future behaviour, I remembered a glimpse I had when being led out, of Mr. Lean and Mr. Fat, sitting in chairs along the back wall, both with eyes closed and heads bowed, though whether seeking divine assistance for my husband or in the ostrich way of more modern mortals, my escort allowed me no leisure to determine.

Next, to the continuing detriment of the shop, I turned my energies to making my case in writing before the full Court of Governors of Bridewell and Bethlem, the two institutions—house of correction and hospital—at that level being jointly administered (which tells you something). This fact I discovered from my conversation with Lean and Fat, the Bethlem subcommittee comprising a small group of these governors serving in rotation, whereas the Court of Governors of both institutions meets not even monthly.

And so, while I waited for an answer to my petition from the larger, slower-moving assembly, I spent another six weeks being stopped at the gate by my Cerberus, Bulteel.

One warm spring morning, after being turned away as usual, meaning that in the more than three months of Jamie’s incarceration I had seen him only once, and with as yet no answer or even acknowledgment to my petition to the Court of Governors, I was walking back home down Broker Row, at the east perimeter of Bethlem, when it struck me the commotion issuing from inside was louder and more anguished than I ever heard it. First I tried to convince myself it must be my own imagination, but I didn’t think so. And it wasn’t my being downwind, for there was no breeze and the din had been no less loud at the front gate. Some dire celestial alignment? The only kind I ever knew to affect them was the moon—they’re not called lunatics for nothing—but the full was weeks away. And yet this morning the noise was extraordinary, the wailing and howling of Banshees, for just as infants before language has harnessed their brain utter sounds they never will again, so lunatics make noises unavailable to sanity.

Reaching London Wall, I looked along there, and seeing the door to Haslam’s house that Jamie had showed me the morning he brought me to Bethlem, I climbed the steps and hammered
away until a maid, a blithe little thing with a pretty face, opened the door a crack to tell me Mr. Haslam was where he usually was, in the Dead House.

Pressing a coin into her hand, I said, “Sixpence to take me there. I have urgent business with him.”

As she peered at the money I asked her why the patients were so noisy today.

“First week of May it’s warm enough,” she murmured.

“For what?”

“Why,” she said, extricating her gaze from the coin to look at me as if I might be a lunatic myself not to know, “to be bled.”

“Who? Not all of them- ?”

She nodded. “All strong enough, who ain’t incurable. It’s policy. Next, vomits once a week for four weeks. Then purges, to the end of September.” She smiled. “After that, the cold weather is medicine enough.”

Looking cunning, or pretending to, she told me to wait.

“If it’s not while you bring me Mr. Haslam,” I said, “you owe me sixpence.”

Laughing, she pushed the coin back at me and was gone.

Now I peered into the hallway, which was not the one Haslam had led me down from his office but the one to his own residence. But there was more light on the stoop than inside, and all I could see was rattan carpeting and bare walls, which seemed fresh-painted, in a cheerful plum.

Eventually a handsome woman, though pale and frightening thin, came to the door with a girl perhaps five years old clutching her skirts. She wore her straight black hair cut short and was sombrely dressed in a plain charcoal gown. Her left hand, when not covering her mouth as she coughed, she kept lightly at the back of
the girl’s head. The girl was sturdy and fair-haired: what her mother was not. She gazed at me saucily, but when I smiled at her, she grew abashed and hid her face in her mother’s skirts.

Though Jamie had told me this was Haslam’s house, it never occurred to me he’d have a family, but why wouldn’t he? Wasn’t this the better part of him I didn’t want to know, so my enmity could remain unalloyed?

Mrs. Haslam’s impatience to be brought to the door by a stranger was communicated by a glance at my basket, as if I had something to hawk. But her maid must have told her what I wanted, for without inquiring anything of me she said her husband would be somewhere in the main building, she didn’t know where.

“The Dead House,” I said. “I was to meet him there.”

“Then I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong door. This is his residence.”

“Yes, but the porter had no—”

“I’m sorry, you must make another appointment—” She was already stepping back to close the door. Before it reached the eyes of the little girl I cast her a glum look, which she answered with a grin as her foot shot out to help the door along, so it slammed in my face. Immediately it opened again upon the sight of her mother extricating her from her skirts, so she could apologize to me, which, once she was facing me and knew she must, she readily did. As she lisped the formula, her mother looked at me apologetic, and I liked them both. Then her mother bowed her head and stepped back. Once more the door closed, and that time it stayed that way.

A week later I received a letter from Mr. Poynder informing me of two developments. First, by a legal process he failed to specify, on May 2nd, 1797, my husband had been brought before Lord Kenyon, as Lord Chief Justice of the Court of the King’s Bench, in his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. After conversing with him, Lord Kenyon was satisfied my husband was a maniac. Second, on May 6th the Bethlem subcommittee passed a motion ordering that until their further instruction, the wife of Mr. Matthews not be permitted any visit to Bethlem Hospital, the patient’s disorder being manifestly exacerbated in consequence of her company.

This letter I could only stare at, saying
Haslam.

“So, Haslam,” Monro said to me two months after my book went on sale, “you never told me you’re a scribbler. Let’s see this great work of yours that’s set the medical world a-buzz.”

“A trifle, Dr. Monro, I assure you. My book has been held in greater esteem than its intrinsic merits could justify.”

“No, no! Don’t play humble, man. Fetch us a copy!”

His muddy boots were up on his desk, a magazine open in his lap. This was in March, one of Monro’s rare days in from Hackney. For two or three hours I’d taken him round to those patients most in need of him. Excluded from their number were the several who’d died in need of him since he was last here, in January. Now he’d summoned me for a nominal consultation, or so I thought. For once I was grateful he had, because sometimes he was gone before I knew it, and I wanted to ask him why he’d given instructions for the removal to the incurable wing of so harmless a lunatic as James Matthews, for on the face of it this would mean we were keeping him forever. But upon entering Monro’s office and being called a scribbler by a man whose father had written a good book but who himself, having no mind, never would and so
hated all writers, I suddenly regretted my recent good luck in becoming a celebrated English author.

Still breathing hard from my dash, I handed him his copy.

“You’re going to have to inscribe this, you know,” he warned me.

“Yes, I was intending—”

“‘Observations on Insanity.’
Now there’s a title. “‘By John Haslam. Late of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge.’ Why, I never knew you were at Cambridge, John. But no degree, eh? Too bad—‘Member of the Corporation of Surgeons.’ A surgeon as well? A man of many talents, evidently. ‘And Apothecary to Bethlem Hospital.’ Now, that I did know.”

Next he read the dedication, frowning, for it makes no mention of the physician. After determining it didn’t continue overleaf, he directed a bleak look at me and then fell to skimming. “‘Gentleness of manner and kindness of treatment…’ Yes, that’s our policy here all right. ‘Knowledge of the recesses of a lunatic’s mind is beyond the limits of our attainment…’ Hear, hear…What’s this?” His eyes came up from the page. “‘Lunatics should never be deceived’?”

“Your father John believed the same,” I assured him, too quickly. “Not if we’d obtain their confidence and esteem—”

“What happened to obedience?” He was back reading. “Hmm. I didn’t know we were wrapping bare feet now. In flannel, no less. What next? Night-caps?”

“Only the worst cases. They—”

“We’ll take it out of your salary.” This was humour with dead eyes. “You know, Haslam, it’s a queer thing to be sitting here gleaning, from a book I didn’t even know was being written, information I never knew about a hospital I happen to be physician of—”

“Yes, I can appreciate—but the opportunity so rarely befalls men busy as ourselves to sit down and—”

He was tapping the cover with a paint-stained fingernail. “So what exactly’s your god-damn point? What’s your conclusion from your year ‘observing insanity’ around here? Jesus Christ. I never knew we had somebody knocking about the place so mad for attention. I suppose the King’s madness has everybody ready to listen to mad-doctors, whoever they might be. You know what Dad used to say, and his dad before him? ‘Madness is a distemper there’s no use to say anything of to anybody.’”

“It’s been two and a half.”

“What?”

“I’ve been here two and a half years.”

“Two and a half, eh? Do you know how many years Monros have been ‘observing insanity’ at Bethlem?”

“Seventy.”

“Is it that long? I guess you know people call us ‘the other Georges,’ eh? Like the kings? Only, none of us is named George, and ours ever was the Kingdom of the Mad. Ha! ha! It’s been forty years since Dad answered William Battie’s mistaken optimism when the bastard attacked us in his
Treatise on Madness—”

“ ‘Like a man whose every word communicates resentment of its instigation.’”

“What?”

“Someone said that of your father’s answer, which was a brilliant one.” It was a relief to be able to say this without dissemblance. Old Monro’s
Remarks on Dr. Battie’s Treatise
was bloody good. Old Monro might have been
a quacking madman
(as someone once called him), but he had a nice sense of the refractoriness of the condition.

“It’s always been a mystery to me,” Monro was saying, “how a man like Battie ever got himself taken seriously. Oh, I suppose he helped found St. Luke’s Hospital, but to hear him ramble on about curing madness you’d think he was taking a piss on the wrong side of the hedge when the brains was passed out—”

“‘From Punch’s forehead wrings the dirty bays.’”

“What?”

“From a poem on him.”

“Ah. He deserved poetry all right, the cunt.” He was fumbling for my book. He held it up. “So what’s your stand, Haslam? What’s your theory?”

I shrugged. “You’ll get no metaphysics from me, Dr. Monro. In my view, theories about madness are another form of it, parasites dining on a tumour. I disentangle myself as quick from their theories of madness as I do from theories of the mad. Most books on the subject are romances, hooks baited for the emolument of the author. Grinning advertisements for private madhouses, mumbo-jumbo catalogues for their hotbed nurseries that never produce a human crop fit to be transplanted into society.”

“That’s my boy! Ho ho ho!” But this outburst came across less hearty than intended. While the eyes lingered on me with ostensible approval, the face registered a slow succession of thoughts that grew by turns more gloomy and tormented until the little mouth burst out with, “But what d’you actually
say
, man? There must be thousands of words between these bloody boards! God-damn! Excellent things about us, by the Jesus!”

“Oh yes,” I said quickly. “That’s why it’s dedicated to the governors—”

“Yes, yes, very politic. You’re referring, of course—” he went flipping back to the dedication—”to those ‘vigilant and humane
Guardians of an Institution which performs much good to Society, by diminishing the severest among human calamities.’ Hear! hear! I say again.” Now the disappointment in his eyes was pathetic to see.

“You might also want to glance at page 136.”

“What?” He was already on his way. “Let’s see. ‘Dr. Monro, the present celebrated and judicious physician to Bethlem Hospital, (to whom I gratefully acknowledge many and serious obligations)…’” By the look he gave me then, this almost pleased him. I had worried the barefaced fiction of it would annoy him. It certainly annoyed me, who heard in it a slave grovelling before a nincompoop. But what rankled for him was its appearance so late in the volume. “Let’s hope your reader lasts this far,” he said, with a mean little smile.

“Let’s hope he does,” I replied, bland and world-weary as a seasoned author.

He was reading down the page. “So you don’t think much of vomiting them—?”

“No, I never found any good from it. Bleeding, on the other hand-”

“In all your months here.”

I just smiled.

“Me neither,” he admitted, continuing to flip. “But considering we still do it—” he looked at me—“I wonder if we should announce it in print—” He returned to reading. “My God, blisters neither? What
do
you believe in?”

“I only say no blisters of the head—”

“A funny thing, but Dad never saw value in blistering of any kind. That never stopped him, of course. He always said, ‘If she works, Tom, do ‘er,’ but the damned thing is, he never told me
how I’m supposed to know what works and what don’t. Between you and me, Haslam, when it came to treatment of lunatics, the old man was as much in the dark as we are.”

“Dr. Monro, my book’s simply a series of accounts of my own unmediated encounters with the insane. Each portrayal of a lunatic character I follow up with a description of their brain after they died.”

“Who did your autopsies? Crowther—? How’s his head, by the by? Kicked by a patient, was he, and fell down the stairs?”

“The kick was a nudge. Crowther was drunk at breakfast. His head’s mended. I do my own autopsies; he does his.”

“And your conclusion?”

“While as yet there’s no definite correlation between lunatic symptoms and brain state at death, that don’t mean we won’t find one, once medicine better understands the brain. In the meantime, recovery from insanity sometimes occurs, but the affliction remains intractable to cure.”

“But I say, Haslam, what use to us is a book that admits nothing we do does any good?”

“Only to keep in view the truth. Some nowadays—and I fear our colleague Mr. Crowther’s among their number—are inclined to pretend madness is a disorder of ideas, or mind alone. How something by definition incorporeal can be diseased they don’t say.”

“Crowther too? I’d have expected better from him. What are these people thinking of?”

“Money.”

“Why didn’t you say so? What are we waiting for? Ideas it is! Ha ha!” He’d turned vexedly back to my book and was fanning the pages. There was something else he wanted to ask. “Speaking of
brains, Haslam, you didn’t by chance examine anybody I tried the electrical machine on—?”

“Possibly. You never told me who they were.”

“Well, there was Rophy and Crawley, and Blackburn—who killed Crawley, didn’t he? Last summer? Did you do Crawley?”

“I couldn’t do Crawley. The skull was crushed.”

“And there was that fellow who used to take off people’s hats with his toes and destroy his food bowl with his teeth, to sharpen them, he’d say, for his next meal—”

“Brody. I did him-”

“Any splinters? Ha! ha!”

“No splinters, but a milky fluid on one of the posterior cerebrum lobes, like a boil, with a corresponding depression in the convolutions, which was so marked they looked like the intestines of a child. But nothing to suggest an electrical current.”

“No charring? No burns?”

“Nothing like that.”

“Because he was an extreme one. I used to give him ten minutes at fourteen cells, and he didn’t like it at all. Four keepers we needed to buckle the straps on him. And when they took them off he was more annoyed than ever.”

“So far, Dr. Monro, I assure you I’ve seen nothing to indicate effects traceable to an electrical current.”

“That’s good. So no harm’s been done. But I guess you know I’ve given up on it. Another Continental gimmick, if you ask me. Bloody Italians. Nobody here seemed to like it, and the staff was never keen. But did I tell you last month the committee approved my application for a shower-bath?”

“Yes, I attended that meeting expressly to support it.” And initiated and wrote the application.

“Now, that will be a good thing.”

“A very good thing.”

“Improvements, eh, Haslam? Always looking for ways to improve the place, aren’t we?”

“Yes, we are.”

“My shower-bath, this ‘mouth-key’ I hear you’re at work on—no, don’t tell me about it now, show me when it’s ready—this little book of yours. We’re pioneers, you and me, and Crowther—”

“Especially Crowther.”

He looked at me close a moment and then laughed. “Who can say,” he continued, wiping his eyes, “that one day the mad won’t recover faster by the help of medicine than without it. Ain’t this what all this ‘observing’ and scribbling comes down to? Breaking ground, aren’t you, Haslam, just like a Monro? One day you’ll call me to the Dead House and say, ‘Look here, Monro, d’you see this inflammation on this lobe here? It always accompanies a general paralysis. I wonder what that tells us.’ And I’ll say, ‘Well, Haslam, why don’t we spread a little salve along there, a smear of clove perhaps, or maybe powders’ll do the trick,’ and the next thing we know another fellow’s up to an honest day’s work. Isn’t this the message about us your little book here’s intended to send out into the world?”

“Something like that,” I said, as confused as he was if he thought we’d soon be dissecting living brains. “Though your version,” I added, “perhaps has more life and colour in it.”

He beamed at this. “Why, that’s because I’m a painter. I work with colour all the time!”

My chance. “Matthews—” I said.

“What?”

“James Tilly Matthews—”

“He’s in your book? He ain’t dead yet, is he?”

“Alavoine tells me you’ve ordered him to the incurable wing.”

“That’s right. Hasn’t it been a year?”

“He’s not dangerous.”

“Lord Liverpool thinks so.”

“So it
is
politics.”

“Smells like it to me, but Jesus Christ, the bugger’s a lunatic.”

“Did Liverpool put him in?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“What’s his crime?”

“Another republican, I suppose. You’ll have to ask his Lordship if you want details.”

“How long do we keep him?”

“Long enough, I should think, so you can examine the boils on his convolutions.”

“He was doing very well until he heard where he’s going.”

“That’s because he’s lucid enough to know what it means. Did you ever notice a funny thing: they’re all insane, but only the idiots are fools? Which isn’t to say everybody except the melancholics don’t live in hope they’ve no right to, even as they object to any sort of change. Listen. If Matthews’ path of resistance is to sink and perish, it’ll be the sooner Camberwell’s relieved of the expense of him and the sooner his brain repays what he owes society for the useless bastard it’s made of him.”

“His wife-”

“Ah, yes. A pretty thing, and then she opens her mouth. What about her?”

“She wants to visit.”

“We settled that.”

“Yes, but too long a solitary confinement in a dreary place can itself-”

“Where else are we supposed to confine ’em? He
is
a madman by your definition, ain’t he? You’re not saying he’s not mad—?”

Can there be anything more infuriating than a weak and doltish authority when it springs an inflexible
No?
“I’m only saying, Dr. Monro, in this instance, periodic visits from his wife might—”

“Damn
might.
Let sleeping dogs lie.”

“This one’s not asleep.”

“Neither lately have we had the bitch yapping in our faces. The one thing we’re in a position to offer here, Haslam, the one thing that’s been any proven use at all, is quiet. Not silence—I’m not deaf. I mean removal from the unremitting din they’ve made of their lives. You let even a little of the old noise pursue them in here and nine times in ten the only worthwhile thing we have to offer flies straight out the window. She’s old enough to know a barred door when she comes to one. For God’s sake, she married a lunatic. What does she expect?”