THE MEDICALISATION OF A PARISH WORKHOUSE IN GEORGIAN WESTMINSTER: ST MARTIN IN THE FIELDS, 1725–1824

Abstract

Any standard account of the history of medicine in eighteenth-century England would include a survey of the proliferation of medical institutions and charities in the nation’s capital. The eighteenth century, it is well known, saw the foundation of large numbers of hospitals, charitable dispensaries, private mad-houses and infirmaries in London. Such institutions, moreover, often served as a blue print for provincial foundations. However, the eighteenth-century also saw the growth of indoor relief, particularly in the metropolis. Few historians have connected the two phenomena. Those interested in the growth of institutional medical provision have tended to neglect the role of parish workhouses. Using evidence from one of London’s biggest workhouses, that of St Martin in the Fields, this article argues that the medical services provided by the parish workhouse became increasingly extensive, and, for this reason, reliance on external medical provision declined over time.     

Depth and diversity in parochial healthcare: Northamptonshire 1750–1830

Abstract

Notwithstanding interesting recent work, the nature of parochial healthcare under the Old Poor Law, particularly in its later years, remains very much under-researched. This article considers a sample of Northamptonshire parishes in order to investigate attitudes towards health care on the part of poor law officials between the mid-18th and early 19th centuries. It will be shown that long-term sickness could be matched by a long-term commitment to paying for diverse and innovative care for the sick poor. Parochial authorities drew on a range of formal and informal medical practitioners to improve the lot of the sick poor, as well as employing a considerable variety of nurses from amongst the wider pauper population. The article represents the first attempt to conduct a systematic study of parochial records for any county.     

PATIENT CASE RECORDS IN MEDICAL AND FAMILY HISTORY: EXAMINING THE RECORDS OF THE ROYAL FREE HOSPITAL

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to highlight the value and potential of patient case records as an historical source. Previous histories of the hospital (and of other healthcare providers more generally) have neglected to consider the patient. This is partly as a result of the ‘history from above’ approach of past histories which have focused on the founders and medical staff of such institutions and never on the people who were treated. During the early 1990s Porter called for the patient to be brought into the focus of medical history, and Risse and Warner drew attention to patient case records as a means of doing so. In the near twenty years which has passed since, however, patient records have still not been utilized by historians and the patient remains largely absent from history. By using the project ‘Royal Free Hospital Patient Case Records’ as a working example, this article will illustrate the benefits of using these records as a source as to patient identity, experience of medical treatment, use of the medical market, and life-cycle of individual, family, and community ill-health. The type of information the historian can extract from patient case records will be discussed and the example sampling method explained. The wider use and potential of patient records in history will then be considered and some practical advice given to help prepare historians to use such records to fill the void that is the history of the patient.     

Unsocial Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment: Ferguson and Kames on War,Sociability and the Foundations of Patriotism

Summary

This article reconstructs a significant historical alternative to the theories of ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘liberal’ patriotism often associated with the Scottish Enlightenment. Instead of focusing on the work of Andrew Fletcher, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume or Adam Smith, this study concentrates on the theories of sociability, patriotism and international rivalry elaborated by Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) and Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782). Centrally, the article reconstructs both thinkers' shared perspective on what I have called ‘unsociable’ or ‘agonistic’ patriotism, an eighteenth-century idiom which saw international rivalship, antagonism, and even war as crucial in generating political cohesion and sustaining moral virtue. Placing their thinking in the context of wider eighteenth-century debates about sociability and state formation, the article's broader purpose is to highlight the centrality of controversies about human sociability to eighteenth-century debates about the nature of international relations.     

Childhood,mental capacity and conversion to Islam in the Ottoman state

Abstract

In this paper I explore the conversions of minors as they were presented in the registrations of the ?eriat court (sicil). Two types of records shed light on the conversion process: the summaries of lawsuits and the sporadic registrations of converts' names. As the mental capacity of a child was regarded as of crucial importance when considering the child's conversion, the kadi classified the children into three different age-groups. Special attention was given to children of seven to ten years: their conversion was approved after an examination of their mental capacity. We can assume that these cases concealed some forms of pressure as well. The conversion of adolescents should be regarded as part of a wider phenomenon — the conversion of rural migrants to Salonica.     

SOME QUANTITATIVE INDICATORS FOR EXPLAINING AND EVALUATING NATIONAL POLITICAL PERFORMANCE

Abstract

Based on the information found in probate estate inventories, this article examines patterns of spousal preference and marital mobility in eighteenth-century Ottoman Kastamonu, located in northern Anatolia. For this purpose, we introduce quantitative techniques and categories of analysis specifically designed for Ottoman sources, primarily postmortem estate inventories (terekes), allowing us to measure how various socioeconomic groups established marital associations and to what extent they married other groups. The article also compares marital and intergenerational mobility patterns in eighteenth-century Kastamonu.     

‘NOW WALKS LIKE OTHERS’: A PRELIMINARY ENQUIRY INTO THE NORTHAMPTON CRIPPLED CHILDREN’S FUND

Abstract

Over recent years scholarly interest in the history of childhood, child health and disability has developed and intensified. However, there are still considerable areas which have not been subjected to extensive historical enquiry, such as the treatment and management of ‘crippled’ children in the UK during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A key opinion in this study is that of Borsay who has stated that the care of poor ‘crippled children’ and their families in Victorian England were ‘subjected to moral condemnation through a surveillance network funded and managed through the voluntary sector’ (). On-going research using a small case series based on material from Northampton Crippled Children’s Fund (NCCF, 1893–1928), Annual Reports dated from 1905 to 1925 and ledgers of surgical records, compared with the monthly contemporary Northampton Neuromuscular Clinic, will challenge this view as being insufficiently nuanced.     

French Eighteenth-Century Materialists and Natural Law

Summary

This article looks at the discussions of natural law by the eighteenth-century French materialists Julien Offray de La Mettre, Denis Diderot, Paul Thiry d'Holbach and Claude-Adrien Helvétius. It is particularly concerned with their discussion of moral values and their attempt to find a materialistic basis for them as part of their rejection of religion. The discussion brings out the différences between them and analyses their dialogues on this question, including the other materialists' rejection of La Mettrie's amoralism, which threatened to undermine their attempt to found a natural law taught by experience and based on human nature. Particular attention is paid to Diderot's many writings which grapple with the subject, beginning with his Encyclopédie article droit naturel, probably written in 1754. He discussed the question in many of his later writings, including in his annotations on the works of Helvétius, who based natural law on the general interest. These writings reveal a tension between Diderot's emphasis on the search for individual happiness and the interests of society as he, together with d'Holbach, attempted to provide a natural basis for morality and government from which to criticise existing institutions.     

Welfare Systems and the Parish Nurse in Early Modern London, 1650–1725

Abstract

This article argues that the part played by parish nurses in the capital's welfare system requires radical reassessment. Such women were playing a central role in the lives of the poor by the early 18th century. It will demonstrate that, at least in some of London's large suburban parishes, there existed a surprisingly sophisticated network of parish nurses who played an important part in the overall care package delivered to paupers. Such nurses, often operating on a very substantial scale, were running what were in effect nursing homes for the homeless and sick poor. These women were running multi-functional enterprises. In addition to caring for the sick poor, they looked after abandoned and orphaned children, pregnant women and lunatics. The existence of these individuals has not been hitherto identified in the metropolis, has been almost completely missed by those interested in the history of women's work, and hardly features in the small but growing literature on nursing in early modern England. Such neglect is not surprising, because, as the article concludes, such 'multi-functional' parish nurses, in all probability, only existed in the metropolis for a relatively short period of time. The metropolitan workhouse movement undermined many functions of the London parish nurse. By the mid-18th century, the roles and responsibilities of 'the parish nurse' had become restricted largely to the rearing and nursing of children and infants.     

The 'Harefield/Anzac Bond': a study of thanksgiving and remembrance in an English village

Abstract

This article arises out of wider work on the impact and experiences of World War I. It deals with the care offered to Australian soldiers wounded in battle and subsequently sent to England to recuperate. Much of this care was offered in hospitals specifically for Australian soldiers and the article deals with one particular hospital, Harefield. The relationships between the community, the hospital and the individual soldiers are investigated and enduring relationships of respect and care are identified. These relationships are shown to stretch to the present day.     

The Italian Enlightenment and the Rehabilitation of Moral and Political Philosophy

ABSTRACT

By reconstructing the eighteenth-century movement of the Italian Enlightenment, I show that Italy’s political fragmentation notwithstanding, there was a constant circulation of ideas, whether on philosophical, ethical, political, religious, social, economic or scientific questions, among different groups in various states. This exchange was made possible by the shared language of its leading illuministi—Cesare Beccaria, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Francesco Maria Zanotti, Antonio Genovesi, Mario Pagano, Pietro Verri, Marco Antonio Vogli, and Giammaria Ortes—and resulted in four common traits. First, the absence of a radical trend, such as the French materialist-atheist trend and, British Deism. Second, the rejection of inhumane laws and institutions, capital punishment, torture, war and slavery. Third, the idea of public happiness as the goal of good government and legislation. And fourth, the conception of the economy as a constellation where social capital, consisting of education, morality, and civility, plays a decisive role. I conclude that the Italian Enlightenment, not unlike the Scottish Enlightenment, was both cosmopolitan and local, which allowed its leading writers to develop a keen awareness of the complexity of society alongside a degree of prudence regarding the possibility and desirability of its modernization.     

Preaching in thirteenth-century hospitals

This article uses thirteenth-century hospital sermons as a window into the moral and religious environment of these charitable institutions, large numbers of which were founded during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What emerges from the reportationes of sermons preached in the hôtel-dieu of Paris and ad status sermons directed at hospitals' personnel and inmates by Jacques de Vitry, Humbert of Romans and Guibert de Tournai is a spirituality that stressed the penitential (and potentially salvific) power of doing works of mercy (in the case of hospital workers) and bodily suffering (in the case of hospital inmates). The particular social context of hospital preaching is also evident in preachers' anxieties about the quality of hospital administration. The sermons that were preached in thirteenth-century hospitals reflect the heightened value placed on caring for the sick and poor, a historical development more often associated with the later middle ages.     

DISOBEDIENT BOYS AND PROMISCUOUS GIRLS

ABSTRACT

Since the 1990s, numerous public investigations have been carried out around the world on the abuse of children in out-of-home care. In the case of Iceland, commissions were appointed by the Icelandic government in 2007 to examine the historical abuse of children and youth in institutions monitored by local or state authorities during the second half of the 20th century. All the institutions subject to national investigations in Iceland were created during the postwar era, the earliest one in 1947. This article addresses the discourse on institutions and out-of-home care from a long-time perspective. It is shown that ideas on those institutions came to the fore during the early 20th century and were closely linked to progressive ideas on child welfare at the time. World War II and the British occupation of Iceland shaped the views on institutional care, and the postwar era was a period of intensive institutionalization of children and youth. The study also shows that the rhetoric concerning disobedient youth was heavily gendered. Whereas boys were accused of petty larceny, truancy and vagrancy, the main evils of girls were related to their morals, promiscuity being their chief vice.     

Jacob Vernet and ‘The Religious Enlightenment’: ‘Rational Calvinism’, the Pastors of Geneva and the French philosophes

Summary

In this article I react to dismissive remarks made about my Jacob Vernet, Geneva and the philosophes (1994) in a recent book by David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment (2008). Vernet, a distinguished Genevan pastor and theologian, who fell foul of d'Alembert, Voltaire and Rousseau, is one of six figures studied by Sorkin, who claims that the religious dimension of the Enlightenment has been much underestimated and that the philosophes were considerably less significant than has usually been thought. Reacting to the accusation that my treatment of Vernet's theology was superficial and unreliable, I reconsider the latter's major theological works (including his Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne, Instruction chrétienne, and Pièces fugitives sur l'eucharistie) in an attempt to validate my previous interpretation, and illustrate that Vernet refused to acknowledge ideas that he had actually published. The second part of the article draws more general conclusions, pointing out spectacular errors in Sorkin's depiction of eighteenth-century Geneva and arguing that he has a clear agenda, which, in my opinion, is wrong-headed, easy to refute and—above all—often based on gratuitous accusations and statements lacking any evidence.     

Mably and Berne

The Swiss Cantons had no greater admirer in the eighteenth-century than the French political thinker Gabriel Bonnot de Mably. The feeling was mutual, at least to some extent, since the Bernese Patriotic Society awarded its first prize in 1763 to Mably, for his dialogue Entretiens de Phocion. The prize then led to an exchange of letters, stretching across some two decades, with Daniel Fellenberg, founder of the Patriotic society—the most important block of Mably's correspondence to have survived. This essay considers the 1763 prize and the correspondence with Fellenberg for the light they cast both on Mably and on Bernese participation in the wider currents of eighteenth-century thought.     

L'Age de l'Eloquence. Rhétorique et “res literaria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l'époque classique

The Swiss Cantons had no greater admirer in the eighteenth-century than the French political thinker Gabriel Bonnot de Mably. The feeling was mutual, at least to some extent, since the Bernese Patriotic Society awarded its first prize in 1763 to Mably, for his dialogue Entretiens de Phocion. The prize then led to an exchange of letters, stretching across some two decades, with Daniel Fellenberg, founder of the Patriotic society—the most important block of Mably's correspondence to have survived. This essay considers the 1763 prize and the correspondence with Fellenberg for the light they cast both on Mably and on Bernese participation in the wider currents of eighteenth-century thought.     

LAST CALL BEFORE THE UNDERTAKER: A COMMUNITY’S PERCEPTION OF THE LOCAL WORKHOUSE AND OLD PEOPLE’S CARE BEFORE AND AFTER THE INCEPTION OF THE WELFARE STATE

Abstract

Workhouses were no doubt the first old people’s homes. Sick old people without social or financial resources had no alternative other than admission to one of these state institutions . These institutions instilled fear in local communities and admission represented a failure in society. Due to medical advances and improved social conditions, people lived for longer and during the 20th century the majority of the inmates were old people. After the inception of the welfare state institutional care for older people was mainly in buildings inherited from the poor law. Consequently, even after I948, for many old people admission to an institution still carried a stigma. By using oral histories of relatives and professionals who cared for old people during this time, alongside documentary sources, this article examines how the process of transition from poor law to welfare state affected families in Oxford. This first-hand perspective, missing from most studies on the history of ageing, explores how caring for old people at a time of great social change was influenced by the local workhouse.     

Old and cared for: place of residence for elderly women in eighteenth-century Toulouse

Although they lacked the ideological and economic advantages of patriarchal authority, women in eighteenth-century France were no less likely than men to receive support in their old age from friends and family. Elderly women rarely lived on their own, and when they could not rely on their children for support, they found care in more distant kin and friends. This support was not derived from economic coercion but from a vague sense of moral duty. Informal networks of care sufficed for both the rich and the poor except in cases of extreme illness.     

Bishop Bickersteth’s Visitation Returns for the Archdeaconry of Craven,Diocese of Ripon, 1858

Abstract

In 1868, an article in the Yorkshire Post about the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum drew attention to Yorkshire's pivotal role in the history of mental health care. It was because of this history, it was claimed, that Yorkshiremen had a special interest in the treatment of the insane. The purpose of this paper is to explore critically this assumption in light of the recent work on the Poor Law's relationship with the asylum. The growth and development of two asylums in the neighbouring North and West Ridings of Yorkshire will be compared and contrasted. The first part of the paper offers a brief explanation of Yorkshire's pivotal role in the history of the institutional approach to the problems of mental health and the growth of institutions in the counties. Central to the paper will be an examination of how each county responded to the differing demands on its resources and how this impacted on the nature of care at each institution. Ultimately, this paper aims to show how Poor Law finances contributed significantly to the development of each institution.     

Children, ‘healthy’ food,school and family: the ‘[n]ot really’ outcome of school food messages

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on a multi-method study with 50 families in Victoria, Australia. Primary school children were asked about food knowledge from school and whether they felt motivated to bring knowledge home. Generally, children and parents felt school food messages are unclear, contradictory and not relevant to them and this reduced the likelihood of messages coming home from school. We identify a critical difference in how families thought about healthy eating and food practices at home and the framework of school messages. Families focused on children’s eating in a pragmatic way, infused with nurturance as well as concern. We argue their practices can be viewed as a form of relational consumption (Lindsay and Maher 2013. Consuming Families: Buying, Making, Producing Family Life in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge.) where food is part of the everyday exchange of love and care. A disjunction exists between familial relational approaches and the regulatory framework of school food messages that impacts how messages move between these spaces. Attention to relational aspects of food consumption at school might allow for a more valuable exchange between family and schools that supports family endeavours to feed children well.