Quotes from Catharine Arnold

If a woman possessed the unfortunate combination of delicate skin, thin eyebrows, a curving spine and a 'sharp tongue', it would be almost impossible for a man to refrain from beating her.

Hebrew monotheism also dictated that madness, like physical illness, was a punishment from God. Deuteronomy named insanity as one of the many curses that God will inflict on those who do not obey him (along with haemorrhoids, the scab and the itch).13

For, as FitzMary knelt to pray, An angel whispered in his ear 'The Holy Land is far away, Prepare another Manger here. Build you a second House of Bread In this fair city of renown, And God His Son,' the angel said, 'Shall come to dwell in London Town.' So spake the angel, bending low Reddens laudes Domino.

In the 1830s, designers wanted buildings that looked Gothic, but they had no real understanding of the planning and construction behind it. This dichotomy is evident in Charles Barry's Houses of Parliament: Gothic topdressing on an essentially Classical building. (Passing the Houses of Parliament one day, Augustus Welby Pugin commented: 'All Grecian, sir. Tudor details on a Classic body.

Nelson's body was pickled in brandy, which was replaced with wine at Gibraltar, and brought back to England, amid macabre speculation that the Admiral's crew had drunk the embalming brandy in transit.

A year after the Great Plague, London was destroyed by fire. Seventy per cent of its houses vanished into the flames. St Paul's Cathedral, the Royal Exchange, Christ's Hospital and the north end of London Bridge were engulfed. Thirteen thousand buildings, including eighty-nine churches, disappeared for ever.

Hanging had been introduced by the Anglo-Saxons during the fifth century as a punishment for murder, theft and treason.

A shortage of coffins was one thing, but then London began running out of graves.

Despite the fact that England was nominally a Christian country, the church had no reservations about capital punishment, with St Paul and Thomas Aquinas enlisted in its defence.

Geoffrey Chaucer's tender-hearted prioress, Madame Eglantyne, who was said to weep at the sight of a mouse caught in a trap, would nevertheless have had a gallows on her property, upon which, at the hands of her bailiff, she would have hanged thieves.

Influenza had brought the all-conquering German army to its knees, while the Allies, stricken too, took advantage of their enemy's weakness to regroup.

Against all odds, Bethlem survived. The Bishopsgate building endured the Civil War, the Great Plague of 1665 and the Fire of London a year later, after which the hospital's governors realised that it needed a new home. In 1676 'New Bedlam' opened in Moorfields, with patients transferred to a 'palace beautiful' designed by the genius polymath Robert Hooke.

the term 'lunatic' derives from luna, the Latin word for moon). Many writers, from antiquity onwards, maintained that the mad were directly affected by the phases of the moon, with the full moon being the cause of the greatest agitation.

One victim was sixteen-year-old John Steinbeck. The future author of The Grapes of Wrath returned home from his Californian school one day looking 'pale and dizzy

I went down and down,' he remembered, 'until the wingtips of angels brushed my eyes.

Medical science had little to offer in the way of prevention or cure, apart from the process of disinfection, notification and isolation as recommended by Dr Niven. There was little consensus on treatment apart from the traditional recourse to bed rest, opiates and folk remedies, while to make matters worse, significant individuals refused to take the threat of Spanish flu seriously.

This drastic treatment worked, and John recovered sufficiently to attend the last three weeks of school before the summer recess, but he was left with lung problems for the rest of his life.

Asylums had originated in France in the seventeenth century, under the influence of Louis XIV, who, during the 1660s, locked up anyone likely to oppose him in a giant police operation described by Foucault as 'the Great Confinement', when over 6,000 people were incarcerated in the Hôpital Général.

More than a hygienic method of disposing of the dead, cremation enabled lovers and comrades to be mingled together for eternity:

THE ACTUAL WORD 'influenza' dates from around 1500, when the Italians introduced the term for diseases that they attributed to the 'influence' of the stars. Another possible origin was the Italian phrase influenza di freddo, the influence of the cold.

Burton makes it quite clear that the 'distinguished' nature of melancholy makes it superior to other forms of madness, as evidence of a refined nature. It is melancholy, after all, which afflicts scholars and poets: 'Melancholy men of all others are most witty.'32 Despite the drawbacks of the condition, his ambivalent attitude prefigures that of many modern depressives, who regard the disease as an essential component of their character, even their creativity.

Nottingham's Rock Cemetery, with its magnificent marble angels and sandstone catacombs.

Melancholy in this sense is the character of Mortality.'34 'And he that knows not this, & is not armed to endure it, is not fit to live in this world.'35

Intent on wiping out their oppressors, Boudicca's army descended on London and burned it to the ground. This first Great Fire of London was so intense that it melted bronze coins, scorching the earth so profoundly that archaeologists discovered a seared layer of soil centuries later.