madhouse

plural madhouses

1. obsoleteA house where insane persons are confined; an insane asylum.

   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.

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

   2 more examples

   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.

   1838, Boz [pseudonym; Charles Dickens], Oliver Twist; […], volume (please specify |volume=I, II, or III), London: Richard Bentley, […], →OCLC

   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.

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

   Synonyms: insane asylum, mental hospital, bedlam, bin, booby-hatch, booby house, bughouse, crazy house

2. broadlyfigurativelyA chaotic, uproarious, noisy place.

   1 more example

   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.

   1970 September 13, Robie MacAuley, “The Army as one of life's awful necessities”, in The New York Times