Early in The Professor and the Madman—set, I'll remind, you in the late 1800s—comes a reference to the strange occupation of a "Bethlem [or Bedlam] Watcher": someone who watches over a crazy person at night to make sure they don't, I guess, eat their own eyeballs, and also just to report on their doings during the night.

The term confused me because it was supposed to be named after one Bethlehem Hospital of London, where such watchers were employed.

That can't be right, I thought—the word "bedlam" for madness is in Shakespeare, and he was writing hundreds of years before this. Surely he couldn't have foreseen the development of a certain mental hospital that would function in London two and a half centuries later—even in all his genius.

The answer turned out to be simple: the Bethlehem Hospital was simply founded there hundreds of years before Shakespeare's time, in the 1200s, as a monastery, becoming a hospital in the 1330s, just 250 years before Hamlet's affliction with bedlam.

It boggles my mind that such an institution could run for centuries after its founding, spawning a general-purpose English word, then keep running for another few hundred years. Don't institutions ever die? It seems not: the Bethlem Royal Hospital still runs even today.