While perusing through Lee Jackson’s “The Victorian Dictionary,” I was attracted to the topic of Health and Hygiene, specifically Mental Health. I chose to focus on The Bethlehem Hospital and I wanted to look at the hospital itself and the stigma surrounding mental illness and patients. Upon reading Peter Cunningham’s entry from the Hand-Book of London, I saw that the hospital’s nickname was “bedlam.” I did some digging on Google and saw that this term was actually coined after the hospital’s conditions! Bedlam means chaos or madness. The hospital itself was reported to be in very bad condition, and it’s patients were seen as chaotic lunatics; which makes the reasoning behind the term “bedlam” understandable. In the entry from The Pictorial Handbook of London there are sickening depictions of the gruesome way patients were treated. The hospital used the patient’s abnormality as a way to gain profits. About 400 pounds were collected annually  from displaying the naked patients. They would be chained to the walls of their cells, and pestered so “the most violent manifestations of their maladies” were shown (The Pictorial Handbook of London). Fortunately in 1770, this practice was annulled. Unfortunately, the condition in which patients were kept did not improve until later years. An article depicting a positive reaction of the hospital is Cruchley’s London in 1865: A Handbook for Strangers:                                     The method and regimen adopted are those which                                                     have been suggested by the wisdom and humanity                                                  of the present school of medicine. Love, and not fear,                                                is the great principle of government, and the unhappy                                              insane are watched over with the tenderest pity.                                    In John Timbs’ Curiosities of London, written in 1867, he describes the hospital as “scrupulously clean” and comments on the “decent attire of the patients” and the “unexpectedly small number of those under restraint.”           These accounts show the dramatic change of both the physical state of hospitals chiefly dealing with mental illness and the stigma towards the patients. Over time, the patients were shown more and more humanity, and given more humane living spaces.