1774

Licensing of British madhouses: British law decrees that all madhouses must be licensed by the Royal College of Physicians and inspected yearly by local courts. Further, patients could only be admitted via medical certificates, making them as the first certifiably insane. By this time, however, the law “was like applying a sticking plaster to an open wound, for institutions of varying size, proficiency and humanity were proliferating all over England” (Skuse, 225).