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] The governors easily convinced themselves that no foundation whatever existed for the charge of cruelty and bad management; that every degree of permissible indulgence had been observed; that the hospital was equal, if not superior, to any other asylum in England; that the mode of confining the unhappy Norris appeared "to have been, upon the whole, rather a merciful and humane, than a rigorous and severe imposition;" in short, that "the general management of Bethlem, as affecting the health, the cleanliness, and the comfort of the patients, was of a nature _creditable to the governors and others concerned in its administration_." What a picture of the standard of excellence held by the managers of asylums at that period, not in Bethlem alone, but generally! To the question, "Has there not been a rule in the hospital, for a certain number of years, that, in certain months of the year, particular classes of the patients should be physicked, bled, bathed, and vomited, at given periods?" the reply from Bethlem was in the affirmative. Twice in the year the patients, with few exceptions, were bled. "After they have been bled," said the physician, in evidence, "they take vomits once a week for a certain number of weeks; after that, we purge the patients. That has been the practice, invariably, for years--long before my time."