James Tilly Matthews

James Tilly Matthews (1770 – 10 January 1815) was a British merchant of Welsh and Huguenot descent who was committed to the Bethlem Royal Hospital in 1797 after developing politically charged delusions which led him to disrupt sessions of the House of Commons of Great Britain.

These delusions were documented in an 1810 book titled Illustrations of Madness, including Matthews' belief that a group of spies were using an "air loom" to secretly torment him from a distance.

Matthews believed that a gang of criminals and spies skilled in pneumatic chemistry had taken up residence at London Wall in Moorfields (close to Bethlem) and were tormenting him by means of rays emitted by a machine called the "Air Loom" or gaseous charge generator.

The torments induced by the rays included "Lobster-cracking", during which the circulation of the blood was prevented by a magnetic field; "Stomach-skinning" and "Apoplexy-working with the nutmeg grater" which involved the introduction of fluids into the skull.

Matthews declared that William Pitt was "not half" susceptible to these attacks[1] and held that these gangs were responsible for the British military disasters at Buenos Aires in 1807 and Walcheren in 1809 and also for the Nore Mutiny of 1797.

[2] Although it is impossible to make an unequivocal diagnosis of a person long since deceased, Matthews' description of his torment by the "Air Loom Gang" reads as a classic example of paranoid persecutory delusions experienced as part of a psychotic episode.

This formed part of the evidence looked at by the House of Commons 'Committee On the Better Regulation of Madhouses in England' in 1815, the findings of which led to Haslam's dismissal and reform of the treatment of patients in the Bethlem Hospital.