In the course of time, as population spread and townships grew, the old resorts were found to be inadequate. The number of the lunatics was increasing, and the whole country was filling up and enclosing. Whipping from place to place became ineffective, and there had been no public institutions available but monasteries, gaols, and hospitals.[676] In the year 1247 was founded by Bishopsgate the Priory of St. Mary of Bethlem,[677] and here insane people were kept and tended, at any rate from 1403. Doubtless there came to be other places thus put to use, such as, for instance, one St. Katherine’s by the Tower,[678] where, we are told, “they used to keep the better sort of mad folks.” But it was not until about the middle of the eighteenth century[679] that grim and sombre circumvallate buildings began to be erected to intern the troublesome.[680] “They were,” says Dr. Conolly,[681] “but prisons of the worst description. Small openings in the walls, unglazed, or whether glazed or not, guarded with strong iron bars, narrow corridors, dark cells, desolate courts, where no tree nor shrub nor flower nor blade of grass grew.[682] Solitariness, or companionship so indiscriminate as to be worse than solitude; terrible attendants armed with whips ... and free to impose manacles and chains and stripes at their own brutal will; uncleanness, semi-starvation, the garrotte, and unpunished murders—these were the characteristics of such buildings throughout Europe.” What may be called the theoretical treatment was bad enough. Those who could not be cured must be subdued;[683] the teaching of Boerhaave and Cullen admitted this, and the latter wrote: “Fear being the passion that diminishes excitement, may therefore be opposed to the excess of it, and particularly to the angry and irascible excitement of maniacs; these being more susceptible of fear than might be expected, it appears to me to have been commonly useful.”[684] It was desired “to acquire some awe over them,”[685] and he declares that “sometimes it may be necessary to acquire it even by stripes and blows.”[686] This was the therapeutic flogging already alluded to.[687] Shock, terror, blistering, bleeding, purging, the use of chains and all manner of manacles[688]—these were the means employed and set down in the textbooks to heal the disordered mechanism of the brain.[689]