The condition of the living rooms and wards[700] was often such that visitors grew physically sick from going into them;[701] but they were rare within those private prisons,[702] strangers are never welcome behind the walls. At York Asylum[703]—an especial plague spot opened in 1777 and burnt,[704] it is said, to avoid disclosures that might hang its keepers,[705] in 1814—a rule was adopted in 1813 “that no person[706] shall be allowed to visit any of the patients without a special written order signed by the physitian.” Official visitors were generally harmless.[707] At York the worst rooms were not shown them.[708] For most of the small asylums there were none at all.[709] Even the larger public asylums during the eighteenth, and also far into the nineteenth century, were horrible monuments of cruelty and neglect. The miserable patients lay upon straw in cells,[710] or upon wooden shelves to which they were fastened. Many were naked or decked over with one blanket.[711] In the wards they were frequently chained to the wall by wrist or ankle,[712] and occasionally by both. One patient at Bethlem,[713] a fierce, powerful man whose name was Norris, after a fracas with a drunken keeper, had his arms and shoulders encased in a frame of iron obtained from Newgate.[714] This instrument[715] was attached by a twelve-inch chain to a collar round his neck, from a ring round a vertical iron bar which had been built into the wall by the head of his bed.[716] His right leg was secured to the frame upon which he lay. The effect was that the patient could move up and down as far as the ring and short chain round the upright bar permitted, but he could not stir one foot from the wall, and could only rest lying upon his back. “In this thraldom,” says Dr. Conolly,[717] “he had lived for twelve years. During much of this time he is reported to have been rational in his conversation. At length relief came, which he only lived about a year to enjoy. It is painful to add that this long-continued punishment had the recorded approbation of all the authorities of the hospital. Nothing can more forcibly illustrate the hardening effect of being habitual witnesses of cruelty, and the process which the heart of man undergoes when allowed to exercise irresponsible power.” The medical men were poorly paid and proportionately neglectful. At the time of which we are speaking—the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century—the physician at Bedlam got only £100 a year.[718] However, he kept a private asylum, and sometimes left the public institution for months together.[719] One of the surgeons is described as having been “generally insane and mostly drunk,” in spite of which he was retained there for ten years.[720]