Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part One The Old Poor Law
- 1 Contagion, Exclusion, and the Unique Medical World of the Eighteenth-Century Workhouse: London Infirmaries in Their Widest Relief
- 2 The Elderly in the Eighteenth-Century Workhouse
- 3 “These ANTE-CHAMBERS OF THE GRAVE”? Mortality, Medicine, and the Workhouse in Georgian London, 1725–1824
- 4 Workhouse Medical Care from Working-Class Autobiographies, 1750–1834
- 5 “A Sad Spectacle of Hopeless Mental Degradation”: The Management of the Insane in West Midlands Workhouses, 1815–60
- Part Two The New Poor Law
- Selected Bibliography
- List of Contributors
- Index
1 - Contagion, Exclusion, and the Unique Medical World of the Eighteenth-Century Workhouse: London Infirmaries in Their Widest Relief
from Part One - The Old Poor Law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part One The Old Poor Law
- 1 Contagion, Exclusion, and the Unique Medical World of the Eighteenth-Century Workhouse: London Infirmaries in Their Widest Relief
- 2 The Elderly in the Eighteenth-Century Workhouse
- 3 “These ANTE-CHAMBERS OF THE GRAVE”? Mortality, Medicine, and the Workhouse in Georgian London, 1725–1824
- 4 Workhouse Medical Care from Working-Class Autobiographies, 1750–1834
- 5 “A Sad Spectacle of Hopeless Mental Degradation”: The Management of the Insane in West Midlands Workhouses, 1815–60
- Part Two The New Poor Law
- Selected Bibliography
- List of Contributors
- Index
Summary
Georgian workhouses served many functions. Although they were nominally devoted to work, they routinely provided care and education for children and refuge for single mothers, as social historians know well. They sheltered, fed, and nursed the elderly, disabled, and mad and acted as de facto employment agents, placing young people in apprenticeships and jobs. They also provided considerable medical care. Medical historians have been slow to explore workhouses, even though simply itemizing their medical services impresses; a partial list includes obstetrical care, surgery, outpatient care, emergency medicine, doctor training, and even trials of experimental drugs and procedures. Workhouses need to be integrated into the history of eighteenth-century institutional medicine, which, for the most part, has remained a history of hospitals.
However, workhouse infirmaries were not just smaller versions of existing institutions, hospitals in miniature. This chapter seeks to show how workhouse infirmaries became unique medical spaces, where particular forms of care for particular kinds of patients occurred. Workhouses' special obligations determined that, in practice, they evolved into institutions quite unlike those around them. While this chapter cannot comprehensively analyze all forms of care in workhouses, two related themes allow one to cast workhouse medicine in wide relief: contagion and exclusion. While no parish can be considered typical of so varied a city as London, the documentation related to the workhouse in St.
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- Medicine and the Workhouse , pp. 19 - 39Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013