To enter into much detail is impossible. It must suffice to say that case after case of gross neglect and cruelty was brought to light; that while 365 patients had died, only 221 had been reported; that a patient having been killed, his body was hurried away to prevent an inquest; that when the accounts were examined, it was discovered that two sets of books of receipts were kept, one of which was only presented to the governors, and that the difference between the sums contained in the two, amounting to some hundreds a year, found its way into the pocket of the superintendent; and lastly we must record that one wing of the asylum was burned, involving the deaths of patients and the destruction of much that it was with good reason believed the authorities wished to conceal.
Of the revelations made by the Committee of the House of Commons in regard to Bethlem Hospital, we shall only briefly speak. We have already sketched the history of this institution. For the most part it is to the _second_ Bethlem--that in Moorfields--the minutes of evidence refer. During the seven years prior to the investigation, the number of patients averaged 238; the annual expenditure, £12,000. Mr. Haslam, the resident apothecary, ruled supreme. He was responsible for the dreadful condition in which the notorious Norris was discovered. "There is," says Sydney Smith, "much evasive testimony, to shift from himself the burden of this atrocious case; but his efforts tend rather to confirm than to shake the conviction which the evidence produces.... The conduct of Haslam with respect to several other patients was of a corresponding description; and in the case of a gentleman whose death was evidently accelerated by the severities he underwent, and of several other persons, there is abundant proof of cruelty.... It is in proof that a patient actually died, through mere neglect, from the bursting of the intestines, overloaded for want of aperient medicine, and it is expressly stated by Haslam himself that a person whom he asserts to have been '_generally insane and mostly drunk_,' whose condition, in short, was such 'that his hand was not obedient to his will,' was nevertheless retained in the office of Surgeon, and continued to attend the patients for a period of _ten years_--a statement so atrocious that, from any other quarter, we should have rejected it as utterly incredible."[145]