The Real-Life Doctor Who Treated King George’s Mental Illness Was Just As Brutal As ‘Bridgerton’
But it was the norm rather than the exception of late 18th-century mental health care
In the Queen Charlotte version of Bridgerton, King George III suffers a debilitating mental illness and goes to desperate lengths to treat it, especially in a time period when people didn’t know what mental illness was.
The doctor who secretly treats King George in the cellar of the palace resorts to harsh and horrifying methods, including bloodletting him, waterboarding him, tying him to a chair and gagging him, and forcing him to spend a lot of time in freezing water.
The Queen stops these treatments after hearing the King’s endless screams, and the doctor who treats it is depicted as torturing and tormenting the King rather than actually making him better.
That doctor is Dr. John Monro, who according to Diksha Sundriyal at The Cinemaholic, was a real doctor famous for treating “madness” in the United Kingdom in the late 18th century. He was a physician at Bethlem Hospital, which was notorious for allowing visitors to pay money to observe mentally ill patients.
But the actual doctor most famous for treating King George was not Dr. Monro.
