This week's Claire Chats video talk is inspired by the research that Clare Cherry and I did for our book on George Boleyn and the fact that he was Governor of Bethlehem Hospital, or Bedlam. I don't know why it sprang to mind but it made me dig a bit more into Bedlam and also how mental illness was viewed and treated in the Tudor period.
Disability History: Mental illness in 16th-17th centuries:
The Madness of Bedlam
Further reading
- Sceats, Amelia G. (2016) Rationality and reality: perspectives of mental illness in Tudor England, 1485- 1603. Masters thesis, University of Huddersfield. - http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/31474/
- Chermely, Cynthia. “‘Nawghtye Mallenchollye’: Some Faces of Madness in Tudor England.” The Historian, vol. 49, no. 3, 1987, pp. 309–328. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24446826.
- Dimitrijevic A. (2015). Being Mad in Early Modern England. Frontiers in psychology, 6, 1740. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01740 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4652010/
- Mental Illness During The Middle Ages - https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/mental-illness-during-middle-ages....
- Andrews, Jonathan, et al. The History of Bethlem. London: Routledge, 1997.
- Mental Illness In The Middle Ages - http://psychology.iresearchnet.com/history-of-psychology/middle-ages/mental-illness-in-the-middle-ages/
- Neugebauer R. Medieval and Early Modern Theories of Mental Illness. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1979;36(4):477–483. doi:10.1001/archpsyc.1979.01780040119013 - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/492092
- Hanson, Marilee. "Tudor England Mental Illness Types & Facts" https://englishhistory.net/tudor/mental-illness-facts/, March 4, 2015
- Shakespeare and medicine: mental health in Tudor times - https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/blogs/shakespeare-and-medicine-mental-health-tudor-times/
- Mental illness in the 16th and 17th centuries - https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/disability-history/1485-1660/mental-illness-in-the-16th-and-17th-centuries/
- All the King’s Fools, Suzannah Lipscomb - https://www.historytoday.com/archive/all-king%E2%80%99s-fools
Contemporary works
- Treatise of Melancholie (1586) – Timothie Bright
- A Brief Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603) – Edward Jorden
- The Anatomy of Melancholie (1621) – Robert Burton
- The Newe Iewell of Health (1576) – Konrad Gesner
- A Right Profitable Booke for all Diseases (1587) – Peter Levens
- The Breviary of Healthe (1552) – Andrew Boorde
- A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight: Of Melancholike Diseases; of Rheumes, and of Old Age (1599) – M A Laurentius
- The Method of Phisicke, Conteyning the Causes, Signes, and Cures of Inward Diseases in Mans Body from the Head to the Foote – P Barrough