PRIOR TO 1779, very few of Birmingham's inhabitants entered hospitals in order to receive medical treatment. Indeed, hardly any of those living in the town had ever laid eyes on such a building. By the close of the 1930s, however, the city supported approximately two-dozen such medical institutions. Nationally, the number of voluntary hospitals approached 700. Combined, these institutions formed a net of medical philanthropy which conceivably caught ‘virtually everyone at one time or another’. From 1779, when the General Hospital first filled its forty beds, medical institutions, including the second medical school in provincial England, multiplied and expanded steadily. By 1939, the nine earliest voluntary hospitals had become affiliated teaching hospitals and offered the town's sick and infirm more than 1,700 beds. These were occupied by nearly 30,000 inpatients during that year alone. Unlike the late eighteenth century, when the General Hospital treated very few outpatients, these nine voluntary hospitals now offered medical care to more than 130,000 patients. With voluntary hospital provision what it was in 1780, it would have taken medical staff at Birmingham's only hospital sixty years to treat a number of individuals equivalent to the town's population. By 1939, Birmingham's first nine voluntary hospitals could theoretically have treated the city's million inhabitants in just seven and a half years. Significantly, these calculations do not include the town's largest medical institution, the Dudley Road Hospital, the former workhouse infirmary. When the Birmingham Regional Health Board was established on 10 December 1946, its nine committees managed 220 hospitals and 42,000 beds. With ever more women working, so the likelihood of patients remaining at home during illness also declined. Clearly, hospitals had become very familiar institutions to the inhabitants of Birmingham and its surrounding districts in less than two centuries. In turn, as ever greater numbers passed through Birmingham's teaching hospitals, medical practitioners and students became far more familiar with the afflictions of the wider community they served.

The institutions themselves changed significantly in the century following their first appearance. Resembling a large mansion when it first opened in 1779, the General Hospital, equally domestic in its organisation, was more often referred to as a ‘house’, than a hospital. Subsequent institutions appeared similarly residential, though often took much longer to organise inpatient accommodation, most operating as dispensaries for years, or even decades, as was the case at the Dental Hospital.