I came across this while looking for childhood diseases for a post in another thread.
And to think, it was the government that allowed all this to go on that proclaimed other country's barbaric and unfit to rule themselves. And was continuously 'colonizing' other parts of the world . With a mindset that they were superior to all the peoples they came across .
Damn ,,,
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Bethlehem Royal Hospital (Bedlam), a palatial asylum for lunatics in Finsbury Square, was open to the public until 1770 as a sort of human zoo. Visitors could pay a few pence to enter and gawk at the inmates for as long as they liked. Thousands of sightseers came each year, wandering through the wards and brutally teasing the patients in order to heighten the fun. At one point, Bedlam's governors felt that the sightseers were behaving so badly, they decreed "the doors be locked on public holidays against all visitors."
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Some prisoners "stood mute," refusing to answer "guilty" or "not guilty" to the charges against them. In such cases, they would be stretched out on the ground and pressed with crushing lead weights until they spoke. Sometimes they died in the process.
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An amazing variety of filth slopped down London's cobblestone streets. Along with dirt, dust and animal manure, there was the ever-falling London rain to add to the mess. Cesspools of human waste collected in puddles everywhere. Dead animals (dogs, cats, rodents, even horses) were left to decay in the streets. In darker corners of the city, an occasional human corpse might even be found.
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"With public executions and public exhibitions of heads and quarters as well as bodies hung in irons, it is clear that the eighteenth century confronted its mortality in a way that is both intense and direct."
- Richard B. Schwartz, Daily Life in Johnson's London
https://forums.canadiancontent.net/history/48176-18th-century-london-its-daily.html