The medical buildings of London are seldom or never visited by the sight-seers of the metropolis. Though the science and art of nursing have recently been made sources of amusement to the patrons of circulating libraries, the good sense and delicacy of the age are against converting the wards of an hospital into galleries for public amusement. In the last century the reverse was the case. Fashionable idlers were not indeed anxious to pry into the mysteries of Bartholomew's, Guy's, and St. Thomas's hospitals; for a visit to those magnificent institutions was associated in their minds with a risk of catching fevers or the disfiguring small-pox. But Bethlehem, devoted to the entertainment and cure of the insane, was a favourite haunt with all classes. "Pepys," "The London Spy," "The Tatler," and "The Rake's Progress," give us vivid pictures of a noisy rout of Pall Mall beaus and belles, country fly-catchers, and London scamps, passing up and down the corridors of the great asylum, mocking its unhappy inmates with brutal jests, or investigating and gossiping about their delusions and extravagances with unfeeling curiosity. Samuel Johnson enlivened himself with an occasional stroll amongst the lunatics, just as he periodically indulged himself with witnessing a hanging, a judicial flogging, or any other of the pleasant spectacles with which Hogarth's London abounded. Boswell and he once strolled through the mansions of the insane; and on another occasion, when he visited the same abode with Murphy, Foote, and Wedderburne (afterwards Lord Loughborough), the philosopher's "attention was arrested by a man who was very furious, and who, while beating his straw, supposed it was William, Duke of Cumberland, whom he was punishing for his cruelties in Scotland in 1746." Steele, when he took three schoolboys (imagine the glee of Sir Richard's schoolboy friends out with him for a frolic) in a hackney coach to show them the town, paid his respects to "the lions, the tombs, Bedlam, and the other places, which are entertainments to raw minds because they strike forcibly on the fancy." In the same way Pepys "stept into Bedlam, and saw several poor miserable creatures in chains, one of whom was _mad with making verses_," a form of mental aberration not uncommon in these days, though we do not deem it necessary to consign the victims of it to medical guardianship. The original Bethlehem hospital was established by Henry VIII., in a religious house that had been founded in 1246, by Simon Fitz-Mary, Sheriff of London, as an ecclesiastical body. The house was situated at Charing-cross, and very soon the king began to find it (when used for the reception of lunatics) disagreeably near his own residence. The asylum was therefore removed, at a "cost nigh £17,000," to Bishopgate Without, where it remained till 1814, and the inmates were removed to the present noble hospital in St. George's Fields, the first stone of which was laid April 18th, 1812.