Hospitals for the excluded or convalescent homes?: workhouses, medicalization and the poor law in long eighteenth-century London and Pre-Confederation Toronto

Workhouses proliferated throughout England and the British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their role in increasingly institutionalized welfare systems has been well studied. Less attention has come to focus on their considerable medical services. Large infirmaries within English workhouses can be found by the early eighteenth century, providing crucial medical care to the very poor. However, levels of workhouse medicalization varied greatly throughout the Atlantic world. This article compares the medical services of workhouses in London with the one established in Pre-Confederation Toronto to assess how and why their medical histories diverge so greatly.

The new Poor Law guardians and the administration of insanity in East London, 1834-1844

One of the main aims of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 was to impose national consistency of practice in poor relief. Central guidance was designed to produce uniformity in guardians' policies on dealing with the insane. This study of the administration of insanity in the eastern metropolis in the first decade after the Act demonstrates that the new boards of guardians were as culturally distinctive in their style of administration of the new Poor Law as the parishes had been under the old regime. A complex interplay of personality, politics, and class determined the corporate culture of individual boards.

Monastic charitable provision in Tudor England: quantifying and qualifying poor relief in the early sixteenth century

Monastic charitable provision in the later Middle Ages through to the Dissolution has often been described as inadequate in terms of both quantity and quality. It has been accused of ineffectiveness because of its allegedly indiscriminate nature. This article suggests that in fact the religious houses and hospitals of England were providing a greater amount of poor relief in a more assiduous manner than has previously been allowed. The core of evidence comes from the 1535 national tax assessment of the Church, the Valor Ecclesiasticus. This contains details of the charitable provision carried out by most monasteries and hospitals as recorded by Crown commissions. After allowances have been made for the bias in the survey, a statistical analysis is carried out which indicates that an upward reassessment should be made of the quantity of monastic charity. Qualitative evidence from both the Valor Ecclesiasticus and from other contemporary sources also suggests that the pre-Reformation Church was providing genuinely beneficial poor relief.