St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics

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St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics in London's Old Street. The obelisk spire of St Luke's Church is in the background.
The church St Luke Old Street (St Luke's Church) in London's Parish St Luke
Handwritten manuscript of a page with about a hundred lines, each a sentence beginning with the word "Let"
A page from the work Jubilate Agno by the poet Christopher Smart, written during his stay

The St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics ( " St. Luke -Hospital for the mentally ill") was a psychiatric hospital in London . Named after London's Parish St Luke's, the hospital was founded in 1750 and opened in 1751 and was the second mental health facility in the city after the Bethlem Royal Hospital (Bedlam). It has been in various locations throughout its history. First a site at Upper Moorfields (Finsbury Square) was chosen and a facility designed by George Dance the Elder was built. The first chief physician was William Battie (1703–1776), known as an 'eccentric humorist' , the author of the Treatise on Madness (London 1758), a psychiatric textbook. He shared the founders' view that the hospital's patients should not be exposed to public sight. George Dance the Younger's palatial building on Old Street opened in 1786 and was open until 1917. It was then used as a printing shop and demolished in 1963.

The poet Christopher Smart (1722–1771) stayed from 1757 to 1763 in the hospital. Jonathan Martin, brother of the painter John Martin (1789-1854), who was convicted of arson at York Minster , stayed there from 1829 until his death in 1838.

literature

  • Charles Newenham French: The Story of St. Luke's Hospital 1750-1948. William Heinemann Medical Books, 1951
  • Leonard Smith: Lunatic Hospitals in Georgian England, 1750-1830. Routledge 2007 ( partial online view )

See also

References and footnotes

  1. ↑ text
  2. ↑ N. Black: The lost hospitals of St Luke's. In: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Volume 100, number 3, March 2007, pp. 125–129, doi : 10.1177 / 014107680710000310 , PMID 17339307 , PMC 1809165 (free full text): 'the patients of this hospital shall not be exposed to publick view.'
  3. ↑ N. Black: The lost hospitals of St Luke's. In: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Volume 100, number 3, March 2007, pp. 125-129, doi : 10.1177 / 014107680710000310 , PMID 17339307 , PMC 1809165 (free full text). Box 4 St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine
  4. ↑ On the person, cf. luminarium.org .

Web links

Commons : St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 51 ° 31 '32 "  N , 0 ° 5' 23"  E