madhouse

From mad +‎ house.

madhouse (plural madhouses)

1. (obsolete) A house where insane persons are confined; an insane asylum.

   Synonyms: insane asylum, mental hospital; see also Thesaurus:mental hospital

   • 1838, Boz [pseudonym; Charles Dickens], Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress. , volume (please specify |volume=I, II, or III), London: Richard Bentley, , →OCLC:

     The palace, the night-cellar, the jail, the madhouse: the chambers of birth and death, of health and sickness, the rigid face of the corpse and the calm sleep of the child: midnight was upon them all.

   • 1997, Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, Folio Society, published 2016, page 263:

     The king experienced his first attack in autumn 1788, and as his condition worsened and the physicians-in-ordinary proved unable to cope or cure, the Reverend Dr Francis Willis (1717–1807), a clergyman doctor who ran a madhouse in Lincolnshire, was called in.

   • 2002 February 27, Richard Eder, “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; When the Impostor Tries To Do the Job in Earnest”, in The New York Times‎:

     He is almost a tourist of his own book. There is a hint of the fad a couple of centuries ago for visiting madhouses in search of the exotic.

2. (by extension) A chaotic, uproarious, noisy place.
   • 1970 September 13, Robie MacAuley, “The Army as one of life's awful necessities”, in The New York Times‎:

     This taut, soldierly, professional story is something of a stranger among American novels about war making. Angry civilians have writ ten most of the best fiction on the subject, from “Three Soldiers” through “Catch‐22,” to make the point (with a good deal of literary overkill) that wars are mass insanity and that armies are madhouses.