Child Patients, Hospitals and the Home in Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract

This article seeks to map out some of the principal pathways to medical care used by the parents of poor children. We focus on the most formal provider of healthcare in eighteenth-century towns, the voluntary general hospitals, but we use these institutions as a prism to consider the way that the treatment of child sickness was managed more generally in five local settings. Utilising eighteenth-century hospital admissions and discharge registers we find that not only were children consistently treated as patients; but that these institutions also operated as part of a wider medical network which included domiciliary care, poor law services, and other medical charities. The boundaries surrounding hospital treatment in eighteenth-century towns were thus considerably more porous than is usually thought, and suggests that they operated as part of a wider medical network accessed by poor families for their children.

Review of periodical literature published in 2012

“…Scholarship on economic aspects of the history of medicine continues to expand. The increased provision of hospital care for children through the eighteenth century is the subject of an article by Levene et al., which demonstrates how children's health became an important preoccupation of the expanding voluntary hospital sector in this period. Jackson approaches this expanding range of hospital activities from a very different angle in his study of the philanthropic funding of the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh.…”