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Updated: July 9, 2025
With prodigal extravagance he tore up another whole sheet of foolscap and began again. "The Passing of the Gael Ireland's Crowded Madhouses." He purred a little over that title and then began the article itself. What he wanted to say was clear in his mind. He had been three weeks in Dunailin and he had spent more time over lunatics than anything else.
But I says, "Every penny they give, is money right out of the people's pockets; and every dollar that the people pay into the liquor-traffic, that they may give a few cents of it into the Treasury, is costin' the people three times that dollar, in the loss that intemperance entails, loss of labor, by the inability of drunken men to do any thing but wobble and stagger round; loss of wealth, by all the enormous losses of property and of taxation, of almshouses and madhouses, jails, police forces, paupers' coffins, and the digging of the thousands and thousands of graves that are filled yearly by them that reel into 'em."
'They are mad! said Christopher, 'to give and take such trouble for no end. 'What grievous disturbance they make about so short a journey! cried Hubert. 'Good stranger, tell us of what Bedlam are they? 'They belong to all the madhouses of the world, said the stranger. 'But why are they here? where are they going? and what lies beyond these mists? cried the brothers in a breath.
"Yet," replied the voice, "all this does not hinder the change of character according as the stomach does its work ill or well; slander, anger, envy are accumulated bile, or faulty digestion; good temper, joy, come from a free circulation of blood, the expansion of the body at will; mystics are anemo-nervous people; your ecstatics are hysterical patients badly-fed, madhouses are full of them; they depend on science when visions begin."
The rain descended in torrents, sparkling past the lights, while the city was a desert, with one dreadful exception; for we were waylaid at almost every turn by groups of starving lunatics, their half naked figures and pale visages glimmering in the glancing lights, under the dripping rain; and, had it not been for the numerous sentries scattered along the thoroughfares, I believe we should have been tom to pieces by bands of moping idiots, now rendered ferocious from their sufferings, in consequence of the madhouses having been cleared of their miserable, helpless inmates, in order to be converted into barracks for the troops.
Every art has its secrets: the attendants in such madhouses as this have been for years possessed of one they are too modest to reveal to justices, commissioners, or the public; the art of breaking a man's ribs, or breast-bone, or both, without bruising him externally.
Hogarth must early have known something of vagabond life, for his father's life during his own youth must have brought him into association with all sorts of people. He knew how madhouses were run, how kings dined, how beggars slept in goods boxes, and many other useful items.
I have heard dreadful thought! of men who, for various reasons, have been trepanned into the custody of the keepers of private madhouses, and whose brain, after years of misery, became at length unsettled, through irresistible sympathy with the wretched beings among whom they were classed.
Eat your dinner, and hold your tongue a minute if ye can." The doctor had always a high sense of Alfred's volubility. He went to work, and soon produced a letter headed, "PRIVATE MADHOUSES." In this he related pithily Alfred's incarceration, and the present attempt to recapture him, with the particulars of his escape. "That will interest th' enemy," said he drily.
In Aleppo, he tells us in one of his letters home, "madmen are looked on as sacred characters... there are no madhouses in the land.... Certainly in England the results of turning all the mad loose would be awful.
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