Jonathan Reinarz & Leonard Schwarz 
Medicine and the Workhouse [PDF ebook] 

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries workhouses were a key provider of medical care to the poor. Workhouse beds in Britain far outnumbered beds provided by charitable hospitals, and a high percentage of inmates wereelderly and infirm, needing not only accommodation and work but also medical relief.

Historians of welfare, the English poor laws, and medicine have been aware of the importance of workhouse-based medicine, but the topic hasnot been studied in depth. This volume is the first to examine the history of the medical services provided by these institutions both in Britain and its former colonies, over the period covered by the Old and New Poor Laws. Written by prominent historians of medicine, welfare, and social policy, the essays document the experiences of those who received care or died in these houses, and form the critical foundation for a new historiography of workhouse medicine.


Contributors: Jeremy Boulton, Virginia Crossman, Romola Davenport, Steven King, Angela Negrine, Susannah Ottaway, Rita Pemberton, Jonathan Reinarz, Alistair Ritch, Leonard Schwarz, Samantha Shave, Kevin Siena, Leonard Smith, Alannah Tomkins.


Jonathan Reinarz is director of the History of Medicine Unit at the University of Birmingham, UK. He has published extensively on the history of English medical institutions, 1750-1950.

Leonard Schwarz has recently retired as a reader in Urban History at the University of Birmingham, where he founded the Birmingham Eighteenth Century Centre.

Spis treści

Introduction – Jonathan Reinarz and Leonard Schwarz

Contagion, Exclusion, and the Unique Medical World of the Eighteenth-Century Workhouse: London Infirmaries in Their Widest Relief – Kevin Siena

The Elderly in the Eighteenth-Century Workhouse – Susannah Ottoway

’These ANTE-CHAMBERS OF THE GRAVE’? Mortality, Medicine, and the Workhouse in Georgian London, 1725-1824 – Jeremy Boulton

’These ANTE-CHAMBERS OF THE GRAVE’? Mortality, Medicine, and the Workhouse in Georgian London, 1725-1824 – Romola Davenport

’These ANTE-CHAMBERS OF THE GRAVE’? Mortality, Medicine, and the Workhouse in Georgian London, 1725-1824 – Leonard Schwarz

Workhouse Medical Care from Working-Class Autobiographies, 1750-1834 – Alannah Tomkins

’A Sad Spectacle of Hopeless Mental Degradation’: The Management of the Insane in West Midlands Workhouses, 1815-60 – Leonard Smith

Workhouse Medicine in Ireland: A Preliminary Analysis, 1850-1914 – Virginia Crossman

Exploring Medical Care in the Nineteenth-Century Provincial Workhouse: A View from Birmingham – Jonathan Reinarz

Exploring Medical Care in the Nineteenth-Century Provincial Workhouse: A View from Birmingham – Alistair Ritch

’Immediate Death or a Life of Torture Are the Consequences of the System’: The Bridgwater Union Scandal and Policy Change – Samantha Shave

Practitioners and Paupers: Medicine at the Leicester Union Workhouse, 1867-1905 – Angela Negrine

Workhouse Medicine in the British Caribbean, 1834-38 – Rita Pemberton

Poverty, Medicine, and the Workhouse in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: An Afterword – K80169 King

Selected Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index