Book review: A fascinating study of the architecture of insanity in Ireland's asylums
Our Lady's Hospital, Cork
‘Magnificent in architecture but often scandalous in governance’ the vast hospital optimistically named Bethlehem rose in palatial self-confidence in 1676 from the ashes of the Great Fire of London. It was the largest civil building in the city and quickly one of the most despised, colloquially known as Bedlam and thus, as Patrick Quinlan writes, ‘a synonym for chaos’.
Possibly surprised by the speed at which the public imagination can operate, Dean Jonathan Swift was an early governor of the Bethlehem foundation and, in St Patrick’s Hospital, Dublin, funded, along reduced but similar lines, an institution for the care of ‘fools and mad’ in 1757. In other words for the mentally ill, the insane, eccentric, homeless and abandoned men and women cast on city streets or housed reluctantly in prisons, reformatories, and workhouses.
