London 1814. Bethlem Royal Hospital, a psychiatric hospital known as Psychiatric Hospital, received 96,000 visits throughout the year. But those thousands were not relatives or friends worried about the situation of the sick, but curious who had approached Bedlam – better known by that name – to mock the madmen.

In exchange for a single penny – the entrance was free on the first Tuesday of each month – the visitor could enjoy the human misery all he wanted. And if the show of the day did not meet the expectations of those present, they allowed visitors to take clubs and the sick to sting to raise the level of the show. They also had permission to give alcohol to the sick, to see how they behaved in drunkenness.

Bedlam was founded in 1247. It was the first convent of the Bethleem Star. In 1337 he became a hospital and twenty years later he began to get mental illness. Soon he started admitting only psychiatric patients, and so the center that is still in operation today has the honor of being the first psychiatric hospital in history. But the methods of the hospital were nothing honorable. It was common, for example, for patients to be tied to the floor or walls by means of shackles. In 1700 they began to call the sick (patient), which does not mean that patients began to be treated properly. It was at that time that they began to open the doors to the public and to turn Bedlam into a tourist attraction. Psychiatric illness related the mentalities of the time with moral weakness. Thus, society was not responsible for their care or healing.

The year after obtaining the brand of 96,000, Bedlam changed its headquarters. The windows of the new building were not given any glass, “to avoid the usual odour of the drivers”. In June 1916, after the most raw winter for patients, hospital chief Thomas Monro had to leave office for inhumane behaviors and treatments. By then, Philippe Pinel (1745-1826), father of modern psychiatry for many, had already begun to change the attitude of society towards mental illness in France, and his influence began to be felt beyond the English Channel.

In the last century, the Bethlem Royal Hospital has been one of the world’s leading hospitals in psychiatric research and innovative treatments. But in popular language older memories have a lot of weight; the dictionary says the word bedlam means “confusion, tumult.”