Swift's contribution to progress
He gave the little wealth he had/To build a house for fools and mad;/And show'd by one satiric touch,/No nation wanted it so much.
Swift’s fascination while he was in London with Bedlam, the popular name for Bethlehem Hospital, is especially interesting. Mental illness was thought to be the result of a physiological imbalance that could be corrected by forcing invisible “animal spirits” back into their proper channels. A wide range of tortures was prescribed. There were purging and bleeding, of course, as was done for every kind of illness. But in addition patients were suspended from the ceiling in a chair and whirled round until they lost consciousness, or blistered with hot irons, or dropped into icy water, and they were routinely chained up and beaten.
Bedlam was a tourist attraction, where “keepers” charged a penny to show their charges like animals in a zoo. In a Tale of a Tub illustration, visitors are shown peering through the gratings. The chained inmate in the foreground is acting out Swift’s description, in which he is ironically referred to as a student, with his keepers as the professors: “Is any student tearing his straw in pieces, swearing and blaspheming, biting his grate, foaming at the mouth, and emptying his piss pot in the spectators’ faces?” Swift recommends that, depending on their particular obsessions, the inmates be sent into the army, the law courts, or the royal court, where they will feel right at home.
On at least one occasion Swift saw Bedlam up close. It must have made a strong impression, since he was later elected one of the hospital’s governors. Presumably he asked to be. At the end of his life he made plans to found a mental hospital in Dublin, and left his entire fortune for that purpose. In that city the majority of the mentally ill simply wandered the streets helplessly, badly needing an institution to take care of them. Swift felt deep sympathy for their plight, especially after he began to experience symptoms of dementia, and he wanted to ensure that they would be treated more humanely than the inmates of Bedlam were.
Swift spent a lot of time planning the hospital himself, and when he was unable to buy the land put over £7,000 “out at interest” so that his executors could fund the purchase. St Patrick’s Hospital for “Idiots, Lunaticks, Incurables” opened on 19 September 1757 and was large enough for fifty patients. Whether or not Swift was an Enlightenment or counter-Enlightenment figure, and to whatever extent you think of him as a liberal, this was a great act of progress and showed huge charity and generosity. The hospital is still open today. That quote is from Jonathan Swift by Leo Damrosch.
There's a fun English folk song about the Bethlehem hospital called Boys of Bedlam, or sometimes Bedlam Boys. I like this cover by the Nova Scotian trad band Coig. https://coig.ca/track/1259025/bedlam-boys?autostart=true
Theres a good pamphlet on this by the old director of St Patrick's, Norman Moore, entitled Swift's Philanthropy. This director, as you might imagine, was keen to set the record straight and shine a light on Swift setting up the hospital. Swift was well acquainted with Bethlehem Hospital, and one of the key differences he enstated with St Patrick's was that "no person whatever shall have access to the patients except in the presence of the Governors or by order of the state physician or surgeon general". A rule to prevent people paying to come and gawk at the patients.