Sound Talking: Jonathan Andrews 'Bedlam as soundscape: Noise at early modern Bethlem'

Sound Talking
London Science Museum
3 November 2017

This paper considers auditory factors relevant to comprehending the historical representation and experience of ‘Bedlam’, or of Bethle[he]m Hospital for Lunatics in the early modern era, concentrating primarily on the period from ca. 1676-1815. Taking inspiration from recent historical, sociological, musicological and ethnographic work on institutional soundscapes, this paper considers what Bethlem’s environment sounded like, and what wider medical, social and cultural meanings were chiefly associated with that sound. As the English nation’s first and for centuries only specialist hospital housing the insane, but moreover one which was rather spectacularly exposed to a heterogeneous mass of tourists and visitors, Bethlem evidently had a significant influence not only on now the general public saw the insane and thought about madness, but on what they heard, expected to hear or imagined they heard of madness, and how more precisely they heard it. I examine the semantic formats used to depict Bedlam noise, exploring its fundamental phenomenological character, representational meaning and impact, not just from the perspective of the spectating and wider public but also from that of patients themselves. In addressing the preoccupation of a range of seventeenth and eighteenth-century texts with the allegedly discordant din and cacophony of Bedlam and of the insane it housed, this paper elucidates the origins of the etymological, metaphorical and cultural association of Bedlam with chaos, uproar and noise. It seeks to shed light on and grant audibility to elements of phenomenological reality and also of hyperbole and cultural construction in this enduring and powerful association over centuries of the hospital’s history.

Bio
Jonathan Andrews is a Reader in the History of Psychiatry, in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, at Newcastle University. His research interests reside primarily in the history of mental illness, learning disabilities and the history of psychiatry, in Britain, from roughly 1600-1914. He has published 3 monographs in the field, most recently (with Andy Scull) Customers and Patrons of the Mad Trade (2003), and Undertaker of the Mind (2001), and previous to this (with Roy Porter et al.) The History of Bethlem (1997). He has published numerous edited collections and articles, including most recently two special issues of History of Psychiatry entitled “Lunacy’s Last Rites” (2012) and “Histories of Asylums, Insanity and Psychiatry in Scotland” (with Chris Philo, 2017). Since 2012 he has been focusing on a Leverhulme funded research project on “Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, ca. 1660-1832”.