What that old theory had been, even under the most
favourable circumstances and among the best of men, we have seen
in the fact that Sir Thomas More ordered acknowledged lunatics to
be publicly flogged; and it will be remembered that Shakespeare
makes one of his characters refer to madmen as deserving "a dark
house and a whip." What the old practice was and continued to be
we know but too well. Taking Protestant England as an
example--and it was probably the most humane--we have a chain of
testimony. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Bethlehem
Hospital was reported too loathsome for any man to enter; in the
seventeenth century, John Evelyn found it no better; in the
eighteenth, Hogarth's pictures and contemporary reports show it to
be essentially what it had been in those previous centuries.[[129]]
The first humane impulse of any considerable importance in
this field seems to have been aroused in America. In the year
1751 certain members of the Society of Friends founded a small
hospital for the insane, on better principles, in Pennsylvania.
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