The Mad-House Keepers of East London
Elaine Murphy looks at the two families who dominated the private provision of care for the insane in London in the early 19th century.
In the early nineteenth century a large number of privately owned, profit-making institutions for the mentally ill east and north of the City of London created a thriving market economy in patients and staff. In East London, private mad-houses were strikingly successful enterprises (commercially if not in terms of the care they offered their inmates), providing well over a thousand places by the time their scandalous conditions were exposed in the Parliamentary Select Committees of 1815-16 and 1827.
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