With such shameful neglect and callousness on the part of the doctors—there appear to have been no chaplains in those days[721]—it is not to be wondered that the unhappy patients fell entirely into the hands of their keepers and immediate attendants, and most of these were quite ignorant people, rendered impatient and brutal by the exasperating ways of the demented inmates, and by their boundless power over them. Instinctive and retaliative floggings (the third kind, alluded to on p. 149), assaults, and possibly even murders, were not uncommon, as well as the distressing and unlimited restraints already referred to.[722] One doctor invented and introduced a special instrument to prize open the patients’ mouths at compulsory feeding. He mentions that, by the usual process, teeth were apt to be broken, and some were left “without a front tooth in either jaw.”[723] In the eighteenth century[724]—up to 1770—and in some places, doubtless, even to later times, the mad people were reckoned among the “sights.”[725] The public paid[726] to go round the asylums, as they do now to gaze upon wild beasts.[727] The baser and more mischievous among them would irritate and purposely enrage the secured patients, as their descendants tease caged animals to this day;[728] and thus reproduced for their ghastly diversion “exhibitions of madness which are no longer to be found, because they were not the simple product of malady, but of malady aggravated by mismanagement.” Such conduct appears to have been general in those times.[729] At Geneva[730] some lunatics would be given grass and horrible things to eat to amuse visitors. This also happened at the Bicêtre,[731] in certain parts of Germany, etc.[732] “Les Fous de Charenton” became, for a time, notorious for their plays,[733] which were presented with much sound and fury, attracting spectators from very grotesqueness. They were forbidden in 1811.