Thinking about Medical Care in the Workhouse

The literature on poverty and medicine has developed considerably since Anne Crowther, Ruth Hodgkinson, Michael Flinn, Joan Lane, and Geoffrey Oxley were building the field. New work—on doctoring contracts, subscriptions by parishes to extraparochial medical institutions, infirmary building programs, the extent of sickness and ill health among the poor, the nature of medical relief under the Old Poor Law, medical negligence, and the medical marketplace—has begun to test ingrained historiographical notions that the nature of medical relief was better under the Old Poor Law than the New and to establish the centrality of sickness to the pauperization process. It has also begun to highlight the essential complexity of medical care for the poor, with considerable regional and intraregional variation overlain by a remarkable expansion in the range of “medical things” that the poor law, Old and New, came to pay for. The sick poor as actors and agents have been given a voice in the flowering of literature on pauper narratives to match that long available for scholars considering the experiences of the insane. And London has moved from a veritable black hole in welfare history to the focus of a renewed appreciation of care and relief for the out-parish, lunatic, venereal, widowed, unemployed, and institutional poor under the Old and New Poor Laws.