I’d seen James Norris before, in a book I used to read – as a kid, weirdly – about assorted horrendous things from the past. He stares out of the etching with the sad eyes and Cupid’s bow lips of a Romantic poet. If he weren’t manacled to a bed, you’d think he was Percy Shelley. In 1815 Norris, in fact a 55-year-old American former marine, became the poster boy for the campaign against the inhumane treatment of the mentally ill in institutions like London’s Bethlem Royal Hospital (Bedlam). Norris was the focus of an inquiry presented to the Parliamentary Committee on Madhouses, one that sought sweeping reforms in Britain’s hellish asylums. By the time his plight was made public, Norris, who had been involved in some violent incidents at Bedlam, had been chained to his bed and restrained with a custom-made iron harness for over a decade. His release from chains (as a result of the inquest) was such a shock to his system that he died a few weeks later. The Norris portrait represents the nadir of an institution whose name was already synonymous with chaos and degradation.
At the Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition, Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond, the morbidly iconic portrait of James Norris is placed opposite a print of William Hogarth’s The Rake in Bedlam, as part of an introduction to the hospital’s 18th and early 19th century notoriety. Hogarth depicted a scene of squalor and caricatured madness, overlooked by two fancy and titillated women. In the 18th century, Bedlam was treated as a sort of human zoo. The women in Hogarth’s vignette have paid to come and look at “lunatics”, the main point being, “Look at these nut jobs paying to laugh at nut jobs. I’m mad, you’re mad, the whole system is mad. Fuck.” There’s nothing like a barbaric Hogarthian scene to remind me that – had I been born 300 years ago – I may well have been a “lunatic”. As a depressive gay prone to nervous breakdowns, I imagine I would have been prime Bedlam material. I’m lucky, in so many ways, that my personal Bedlam consists of weekly therapy sessions and two pills a day that turn the looped shriek of my anxiety into a hum. But the old stigma around mental health problems, of course, remains. In taking a detailed look at the history of people like me, I suppose I’m trying to find out why. And why, also, with more cuts to mental health funding imminent, this area of healthcare is so overlooked.
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