6.2 Bedlam Part 2 Cruelty Or Cure by History of Psychiatry Podcast Series published on 2016-10-12T13:45:28Z This podcast carries on from last week’s, asking: Were Bethlem’s staff negligent and cruel? Did it do little to cure its inmates? The conclusion is that Bethlem was for centuries a troubled institution dominated by recurring scandals. It was a Bedlam in all senses of the word, potentially ‘brutal, cold, dark, and dirty’. Yet this needs to be balanced with a strong imperative to help sufferers and a more recent history, since the mid-nineteenth century, which was a model of good psychiatric practice. Image of the week: William Norris, 1815 Full Bibliographic Record: Wellcome Library Catalogue L0011319 Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Genre Learning