I only fell into Joe's arms, and when I came to, there the dear fellow was, crying over me like a baby, while old Sally danced round us like a bedlamite, in spite of her rheumatics, shouting: 'Hosanna!
"Spinning-Wheel Stories"
Louisa May Alcott
Any way, it came to be used for a witless fellow, or bedlamite.
"Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles"
Daniel Hack Tuke
Naturally the transcendental movement struck him on its ludicrous side, and in his After-Dinner Poem, read at the Phi Beta Kappa dinner at Cambridge in 1843, he had his laugh at the "Orphic odes" and "runes" of the bedlamite seer and bard of mystery "Who rides a beetle which he calls a 'sphinx,' And O what questions asked in club-foot rhyme Of Earth the tongueless, and the deaf-mute Time!
"Brief History of English and American Literature"
Henry A. Beers