William Charles Hood

[3][4][5] From 1852 to 1862[1][6] Hood was the resident Physician and Superintendent of Bethlem Royal Hospital, living there with his wife and family;[7] he "worked indefatigably for the improvement of the patients' conditions, and particularly for the segregation of the criminal insane".

[3] At Bethlem, Hood "carried out many excellent and necessary reforms",[8] including removing the bars from the windows, carpeting bedroom floors, replacing wooden benches and tables with armchairs and sofas, putting paintings on the walls and statues and busts in the wards,[9] abolishing forcibly restraining the patients and allowing some to go on supervised day visits to Kew Gardens[10] and the Crystal Palace.

[7] An article by Henry Morley in Charles Dickens's Household Words describes some of the changes made by Hood at Bethlem: Within the entrance gates, as we went round the lawn towards the building, glancing aside, we saw several groups of patients quietly sunning themselves in the garden, some playing on a grass-plot with two or three happy little children.

The sufferers feel that surely they are not cut off from fellowship with man, not objects of a harsh distrust, when even little children come to play with them, and prattle confidently in their ears.

There are no chains nor strait waistcoats now in Bethlehem; yet, upon the staircase of a ward occupied by men the greater number of whom would, in the old time, have been beheld by strong-nerved adults with a shudder, there stood a noble little boy, another fragment of the Resident Physician's family, with a bright smile upon his face, who looked like an embodiment of the good spirit that had found its way into the hospital, and chased out all the gloom.