Many Forms of Madness by Rosemary Ruether

Author:Rosemary Ruether
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fortress Press

Chains and Other Restraints to Control the Unruly

“Restraints” refers to various ways in which mental hospitals, asylums, and poorhouses over the years have immobilized the bodies of people with mental illness in order to prevent them from acting out in ways seen as dangerous or annoying to the staff of the facility, such as injuring others or themselves, throwing or breaking things, or simply yelling and thrashing about. The history of restaints has shown that they have been used primarily for the convenience of the staff, other patients, and the institution, rather than as anything that was of help to the ill person, although it often has been claimed to be a way of “calming” them.

The most common form of restraint used in mental hospitals during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries was chains. The person with mental illness was chained to the wall or the floor of his or her cell. Sometimes this chaining was extensive and left on for years. The American sailor James Norris was committed to the Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane (referred to as “bedlam”) in 1800. There in a small cell he was chained by the feet to his bed. An iron harness riveted to an upright bar bound him sitting up, allowing him almost no movement even to lie down. After spending fourteen years in this condition he was discovered in 1814 by reformers and released, only to die soon after.4

In mental hospitals in the early nineteenth century, it was common for the cells for the “insane” to be in the basement, damp and without heat, with only straw for beds. It was frequently claimed that the “insane” were impervious to cold, pain, and hunger, and thus it was unnecessary to give them adequate food, heat, or even clothing. Neglect and filthy surroundings were common. A visitor to Pennsylvania Hospital in the early nineteenth century reported:

We next took a view of the Maniacs. Their cells are in the lower story, which is partly underground. Their cells are about ten feet square, made strong as a prison.… Here are both men and women, between twenty and thirty in number. Some of them have beds; most of them clean straw. Some of them are fierce and raving. Nearly or quite naked; some singing and dancing; some in despair; some were dumb and would not open their mouths.5

Viewing the “maniacs” was seen as an entertaining public spectacle in the United States, as well as in Europe. Townspeople would visit an insane asylum as a Sunday outing, taunting the chained patients to provoke them into a rage. Pennsylvania Hospital made some profit out of this curiosity by charging a four-pence fee.6 This was also the custom at Bethlehem Hospital in London, an institution that goes back to medieval times.7

It was common in this period to see people with mental illness as similar to wild beasts who, having lost their reason, had lost what made them distinctively human. Not just chains but frequent beatings were seen as necessary to break their “will” and force them to submit to authority.

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