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When Lady Briget Perceval tricked John Mitford into supporting her campaign to promote Caroline of Brunswick, the then Princess of Wales, he was hidden away in Whitmore House, a for-profit mad-house owned by the cany and bombastic Thomas Warburton. From the inside, Mitford helped Lady Perceval place forged letters in the newspapers-an arrangement that ended badly, with a falling out and a lawsuit from which Mitford was acquitted. During his stay, he had opportunity to observe the cruel suffering to which mental patients were subjected in this and other private asylums, many of which were equally if not even more depraved and corrupt. The horrors were such that he, a Navy Officer who had seen his fair share of inhumanity and death, was moved to campaign for their abolition. In the two pamphlets collected herein, first published in the 1820s, he describes the filth and revolting conditions, the brutal punishments, the debauchery of the keeperesses, the fleecing of patients, the pretences put up for visiting relatives, the (perfectly sane) wealthy criminals absconding to evade justice, the weaponisation of certificates on insanity obtainable from quack doctors and corrupt physicians, and the preferential treatment given to those with money and aristocratic connections. The revelations helped trigger the 1827 Select Committee to investigate conditions at the Bethnal Green asylums, whose notoriety proved instrumental in the the introduction of the Act for the Regulation of Madhouses of 1828, which prescribed new rules for the committing of patients to asylums and licensed houses.
