For nearly 300 years it achieved notoriety for its private madhouses.

After being released from St Luke's, Smart was taken to a private madhouse.

Such displayers of religious emotionalism were often confined not only to private madhouses, but also to Bedlam".

He was reacting against the "high dead-walls" of England which he felt made a row of homes there seem "as of a series of private madhouses."

He inveighed against private madhouses run by non-physicians and non-clergymen for profit.

Public suspicion of their motives was also aroused by the profits that were made from private madhouses.

(He may have been confined in a private madhouse before this.)

Lamb used a large part of his relatively meagre income to keep his beloved sister in a private 'madhouse' in Islington called Fisher House.

As to the charges brought against the husband, they were vague, supported by no witnesses, excepting that of imprisonment in a private madhouse.

However, those judged insane were increasingly admitted to local workhouses, poorhouses and jails (particularly the "pauper insane") or sometimes to the new private madhouses.