Europe's Oldest Psychiatric Hospital
Bethlem is Europe's oldest extant psychiatric hospital and has operated as such, continuously, for over six hundred years. It has also been the continent's most famous and, indeed, infamous specialist institution for the care and control of the insane and its popular designation – "Bedlam" – has long been synonymous with madness itself.
Read more about this topic: Bethlem Royal Hospital
Famous quotes containing the words europe, oldest, psychiatric and/or hospital:
“Europe has lived on its contradictions, flourished on its differences, and, constantly transcending itself thereby, has created a civilization on which the whole world depends even when rejecting it. This is why I do not believe in a Europe unified under the weight of an ideology or of a technocracy that overlooked these differences.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“This fond reiteration of the oldest expressions of truth by the latest posterity, content with slightly and religiously retouching the old material, is the most impressive proof of a common humanity.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Indeed the involuntary character of psychiatric treatment is at odds with the spirit and ethics of medicine itself.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“The sun his hand uncloses like a statue,
Irrevocably: thereby such light is freed
That all the dingy hospital of snow
Dies back to ditches.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)