First published in 1999, this rewarding volume offers a close and systematic analysis of the General Infirmary at Bath, which was founded in 1739 to grant ‘lepers and cripples, and other indigent strangers’ access to the spa waters. Four main themes are pursued in order to locate the hospital within its economic, socio-cultural and political contexts: arrangements for management and finance under the conditions of a prospering commercial economy; the rewards and restrictions experienced by the physicians and surgeons who donated their professional services free of charge; and the constructions of an integrated social and political élite around the physical and moral rehabilitation of the sick poor. In this way, the example of Bath – a stylish resort whose visitors and residents exemplified the dynamic of fashionable philanthropy – is used to open up issues of significance to our understanding of Georgian Britain as a whole.

First published in 1999, this rewarding volume offers a close and systematic analysis of the General Infirmary at Bath, which was founded in 1739 to grant ‘lepers and cripples, and other indigent strangers’ access to the spa waters. Four main themes are pursued in order to locate the hospital within its economic, socio-cultural and political contexts: arrangements for management and finance under the conditions of a prospering commercial economy; the rewards and restrictions experienced by the physicians and surgeons who donated their professional services free of charge; and the constructions of an integrated social and political élite around the physical and moral rehabilitation of the sick poor. In this way, the example of Bath – a stylish resort whose visitors and residents exemplified the dynamic of fashionable philanthropy – is used to open up issues of significance to our understanding of Georgian Britain as a whole.

Lunatic Hospitals in Georgian England, 1750–1830 constitutes the first comprehensive study of the philanthropic asylum system in Georgian England. Using original research and drawing upon a wide range of expertise on the history of mental health this book demonstrates the crucial role of the lunatic hospitals in the early development of a national system of psychiatric institutions. These hospitals were to form an essential historical link in the emergence of a national system of institutional provision for mentally disordered people. They provided important prototypes for the subsequent development of a network of state-sponsored lunatic asylums during the nineteenth century. This is an impressive volume which covers various areas including: the provincial lunatic hospitals managing the hospital managing the insane. This book will interest specialist historians as well as mental health professionals and people interested in local and regional studies.

The history of the voluntary sector in British towns and cities has received increasing scholarly attention in recent years. Nevertheless, whilst there have been a number of valuable contributions looking at issues such as charity as a key welfare provider, charity and medicine, and charity and power in the community, there has been no book length exploration of the role and position of the recipient. By focusing on the recipients of charity, rather than the donors or institutions, this volume tackles searching questions of social control and cohesion, and the relationship between providers and recipients in a new and revealing manner. It is shown how these issues changed over the course of the nineteenth century, as the frontier between the state and the voluntary sector shifted away from charity towards greater reliance on public finance, workers' contributions, and mutual aid. In turn, these new sources of assistance enriched civil society, encouraging democratization, empowerment and social inclusion for previously marginalized members of the community. The book opens with an introduction that locates medicine, charity and mutual aid within their broad historiographical and urban contexts. Twelve archive-based, inter-related chapters follow. Their main chronological focus is the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which witnessed such momentous changes in the attitudes to, and allocation of, charity and poor relief. However, individual chapters on the early modern period, the eighteenth century and the aftermath of the Second World War provide illuminating context and help ensure that the volume provides a systematic overview of the subject that will be of interest to social, urban, and medical historians.

At the core of this book are three central contentions: That medical welfare became the totemic function of the Old Poor Law in its last few decades; that the poor themselves were able to negotiate this medical welfare rather than simply being subject to it; and that being doctored and institutionalised became part of the norm for the sick poor by the 1820s, in a way that had not been the case in the 1750s. Exploring the lives and medical experiences of the poor largely in their own words, Sickness, medical welfare and the English poor offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of the so-called crisis of the Old Poor Law from the later eighteenth century. The sick poor became an insistent presence in the lives of officials and parishes and the (largely positive) way that communities responded to their dire needs must cause us to rethink the role and character of the poor law.

Spa resorts were a favoured destination for affluent seekers after health and comfortable leisure in opulent surroundings from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, although in the railway age they began to suffer from competition from new fashions in leisure and tourism, especially the seaside holiday. During their heyday the leading spa resorts became hotbeds of political and diplomatic intrigue, and gathering-points for high society. As such, they also became important businesses, and distinctive, carefully-managed urban environments. ‘Taking the waters’ at a mineral springs resort fell into eclipse over much of the Western world in the mid-twentieth century, only to revive in more diffuse guise as ‘health and wellness tourism’ in the new millennium. This book examines an important body of practices and experiences from the perspectives of health, pleasure, conspicuous consumption and display, urban governance, culture and politics across a quarter of a millennium, drawing its examples not only from the British Isles, France, Spain and Central Europe, but also from the United States and Australia. An international team of distinguished historians puts this neglected theme back on the historical map, at a time when spas and their treatments have never been so popular and visible in contemporary society. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Tourism History.

Although articles in this volume fall into three thematic clusters, each of those groups exemplifies three general themes: micro-social processes; innovations and the question of continuity versus discontinuity; and the relationship between ideas and practice. Most of these essays touch upon, and some of them are exclusively concerned with, small scale social processes: e.g. the routines of the all-female early-modern childbirth ritual, the different ways that male practitioners were summoned to such occasions, the functioning of voluntary hospitals, the protocols underlying patient records. Such social practices are well worth studying as both the sites and drivers of larger-scale historical change. Whenever there comes into being something new - whether an institution (a hospital), a social practice (the summoning of men as midwives) or a concept (a new approach to disease) - the question arises as to its relationship with what went before. This concept resonates throughout these essays, but is most to the fore in the chapters on early Hanoverian London (which asks explanatory questions) and on Porter versus Foucault (who represent the extremes of continuity and discontinuity respectively). A couple of generations ago, the ’history of ideas’ was pursued largely without reference to practice; in recent times, the danger has appeared of the very reverse taking place. This book ranges across a broad spectrum in this respect, the emphasis being sometimes upon practice (Eleanor Willughby’s work as a midwife) and sometimes upon ideas (concepts of pleurisy across the centuries); but in every case there is at least the potential for relating the two to one another. None of these themes is specific to medical history; on the contrary, they are the bread-and-butter of historical reconstruction in general.