In 1810 the London apothecary John Haslam published Illustrations of Madness, the first book-length description of a single patient's delusions. The patient was James Tilly Matthews, a former peace campaigner of the French Revolutionary era who had been confined to Bethlem Hospital, known as Bedlam, from 1797. Matthews believed that a gang of Jacobin agents controlled his mind with a machine called the Air Loom, which wove gases and magnetic fluid into rays aimed at its victims. His account named operators, including a leader called Bill the King, and claimed that the same gangs were influencing politicians across London. Matthews had drawn a technical diagram of the device, which Haslam reproduced with mocking commentary. The drawing has the cool precision of an engineer's blueprint, and it is considered the first published artwork by an asylum inmate.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.