Bedlam: London and its Mad by Arnold Catharine

Author:Arnold, Catharine [Arnold, Catharine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2008-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

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‘OUR KING IS MAD’

Just as Queen Victoria was to define grief for a generation, the madness of George III influenced popular attitudes towards insanity. George’s case history reflects the treatment options available for madness towards the close of the eighteenth century and reveals how his condition affected the popular consciousness and led to greater tolerance and sympathy. The medical historians Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine conducted a retrospective diagnosis of George III in the 1960s, during which they meticulously examined the evidence of the king’s doctors, family and servants, and came to a fascinating conclusion about the true nature of his illness. However, it is their account of his treatment which proves the most interesting, revealing contemporary practices in ‘mad doctoring’ and the impact of King George’s madness on his family, his household and his subjects. A mad country, governed–or rather ungoverned–by mad politicians and a mad monarch, England should have been a laughing stock. But, mad or not, the nation’s problems provided comic relief compared with events across the Channel.

George III’s sixty crowded years upon the throne (1760–1820) saw the conquest of Canada, the exploration of Australia and New Zealand, the annexation of the West Indies and the colonisation of India. At the same time, Britain suffered the humiliating loss of the American colonies, was shaken by the French Revolution, threatened by Napoleon, and delivered by Nelson and Wellington. At home, Parliament gained ascendancy over the monarchy, a process hastened by George’s own illness.

The king’s first episode came in 1762, when he was twenty-four and had been on the throne for two years. He was blooded seven times and had three blisters applied. Horace Walpole attributed the disorder to the ‘strange, universally epidemic cold’ then prevailing, and the preliminary symptoms of later attacks usually included a feverish cold or cough, with stiffness and cramping of the whole body.1 The first attack lasted for a month or two. Three years later, in 1765, the king was said to be indisposed once again, but a culture of secrecy had already grown up around him, and the mental derangement seems to have passed on after a month or two.

George seems to have been symptom-free for twelve years. But, in 1788, when he was fifty years old, his insanity recurred in a more acute and unmistakable form. On this, and every subsequent occasion, any form of mental stress or excitement precipitated an attack. On 12 June 1788, George snapped, going down with a chill and a ‘bilious attack’ (sickness and headache) apparently brought on by his failure to change out of wet stockings after getting caught in the rain. The medicines used to tackle his fever, according to one commentator, effectively drove him mad: ‘the medicines which they were then obliged to use for the preservation of his life, have repelled [the fever] upon the brain’.2 The king was attended by Sir George Baker, president of the Royal College of Physicians, but the patient showed little improvement. His condition was subsequently attributed to gout, brought on not by sybaritic living but by a diet of sauerkraut and lemonade.

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