Eighteenth-Century Child Health Care in a Northampton Infirmary: A Provincial English Hospital

Abstract

For more than a century before the opening of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (1852) children in England were treated by and even admitted to Voluntary Hospitals. Amongst the earliest English 18th-century records to give the patient's age, are held in Northampton General Hospital, in an archive dating from its foundation as the Northampton Infirmary in 1744 afford a fascinating glimpse into in- and out-patient child health. The hospital archive has recently rediscovered the 1743 Statutes, contemporary patient literature, minute books, contemporary engravings of the outside and inside of the hospital and menus. Thus we can speculate with a high degree of certainty as to what would be the then current Infirmary environment and treatments for illustrative examples of the children seen in the period 1744–45.