#dishist

[historybizarre]

How Bedlam became ‘a palace for lunatics’

When it was rebuilt in 1676, London’s Bethlem Hospital was the most opulent mental asylum the world had ever seen – from the outside. Inside, it was another matter entirely.

It was a London landmark so famous, tourists would visit it alongside Westminster Abbey and the zoo; so notorious, the very name came to mean madness and chaos. It inspired countless poems, dramas and works of art. And the building it was housed in from 1676 appeared so opulent that it was compared to none other than the Palace of Versailles.

This was Bethlem Hospital, more commonly known by its nickname (and the word adapted from it): Bedlam. Almost from the start, Bethlem was much more than a mental asylum. “It was a landmark in the City of London, right by Bishopsgate, and it was also one of the very first to specialise in people who were called ‘mad’ or ‘lunatic’. It becomes this proverbial, archetypal home of madness,” says Mike Jay, author of the book This Way Madness Lies, published to accompany the exhibition Bedlam: the asylum and beyond now at London’s Wellcome Collection. “Any asylum is called a ‘bedlam’ quite early on. Then it becomes a generic term, and then it’s something that means more than an asylum – there are all these metaphors of the world being ‘a great bedlam’.”

Content note: the article does not go into detail about mistreatment of the inmates, but there is a historical image of a patient in restraints.

[lindahall]

Scientist of the Day—Charles Steinmetz

Carl August Rudolph Steinmetz, an electrical engineer, mathematician, and industrial researcher, was born on April 9, 1865.

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[fromthehandsofquacks]

19th century citizen portraits often do not specifically feature the disability object. Rather, they position oeople and their relationships with each other to show familial ties or romance -- as in the case of this couple!

Learn more about disability and citizen portraits: https://library.medicine.yale.edu/blog/picturing-disability-technology

Photo: the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Yale University 

[historybizarre]

Seeing History: a glimpse into the National Museum of Scotland’s historic spectacles collection.

From September 2019 – January 2020, we worked through around 200 items, updating their object descriptions, photographing them with their accession numbers and re-storing them in new trays lined with Plastazote foam.

The increased availability of newspapers and literature in the 18th century helped to fuel a demand for reading glasses. The development of sides or ‘temples’ is thought to have occurred at some point before 1730. This pair possess another interesting characteristic, unusual to today’s glasses wearers – the circular feature at the end of the temples. These would allow the wearer to secure their glasses neatly into their wig – as was the fashion throughout the 18th century.

[historybizarre]

The Material Culture of Living with Physical Disability at Home, 1700-1900

What was it like to live with a physical disability at home in early America? How did that experience change over time? In this talk, Nicole Belolan explores how people used objects to live with infirmities at home from 1700-1900. Through a series of case studies highlighting artifacts ranging from bedsteads to wheelchairs to adult cradles, she discusses what changed and what stayed the same when it came to managing and living with physical disabilities before the era of curb cuts and accessible restrooms.

[historybizarre]

“Save Changes”: Telling Stories of Disability Protest

At first, it was a simple case of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” as I worked with WikiEducation Foundation to teach a methods course in which students created disability history content. But th…

On April 5, 1977 people with disabilities took to the streets in cities with regional HEW offices. Almost everywhere protests were either cut off or fizzled.

In San Francisco things were different. With little warning, over 100 people streamed into the Federal Building and refused to leave for nearly a month.

The protests succeeded in part because of the Bay Area’s unique climate. Since the 1960s disabled people had been drawn to the rich mosaic of minorities who challenged the status quo: gay men and lesbians, students, artists, and practitioners of new religions, all that included people with disabilities.

[historybizarre]

Among the more than half a million pieces of trade literature held at Smithsonian Libraries,  the Cooper Hewitt Museum Library’s Geo. F. Sargent’s illustrated catalogue and price list for 1886 is an early rare nineteenth century catalog that focuses on the manufacture and sale of furniture and medical apparatuses geared to meet the needs of the disabled.

 It features then state of the art wheelchairs that employed modern mechanisms and lightweight frames, furnished with lush contemporary ornamentation and velour or leather upholstery appropriate for any Victorian parlor.  The catalog chronicles the growth and marketing of mass-produced patent furniture, the promotion of products that thoughtfully address comfort and mobility, capitalization on an under-served niche market, and the emerging age of American innovation and invention.

[historybizarre]

In the middle of the 17th century BCE, there was a young blind girl living in the northern regions of the fading Old Babylonian empire.

Dozens of such references survive in the archives of the Third Dynasty of Ur, a southern Sumerian city that dominated most of Mesopotamia about four hundred years before Shinunutum’s lifetime. In this vibrant period blind workers occupied positions in many areas of society.[10] Some jobs, like water-drawing and flour-milling, gave simple and sedentary work to newly-blind adults and prisoners of war who had been blinded in vengeance, but many others required skill and expertise.[11]

Among the best attested occupations for blind people, in fact, was music. Lists of ration distributions from the cities of Umma and Girsu preserve the names of eleven blind musicians (eight male and three female), making it the third most common occupation after milling and water-drawing.

Their presence on distribution lists suggests that these blind musicians were either slaves or shirku (individuals bound to a temple),[12] and it is likely that Shinunutum was as well. As such she would have had little say in her education or career, but this is unsurprising—few people did at the time.