Medicine and the Workhouse, edited by Jonathan Reinarz and Leonard Schwarz

Abstract

Medicine and the Workhouse, edited by Jonathan Reinarz and Leonard Schwarz. Rochester, University of Rochester Press, 2013. vi, 281 pp. $90.00 US (cloth). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the workhouse functioned as a site of medical activity; a space where residents fell ill, aged, contracted diseases, received treatment from resident and visiting physicians, and often died. Despite the existence of a voluminous literature on various aspects of workhouse life and the operations of the Old and New Poor Laws, historians have tended to neglect the subject of workhouse medicine or consigned it to an afterthought in their broader studies. This omission is problematic. As Jonathan Reinarz and Leonard Schwarz observe, workhouses provided spaces where physicians could secure employment and offer care to impoverished patients who suffered from a range of physical and mental conditions. Historians of medicine have devoted considerable attention to the development of institutional medicine in institutions such as hospitals and asylums and explored the activities of those fortunate enough to secure more glamorous hospital posts than those available in the Poor Law system. Yet attention also needs to be paid to the existence of a complex and diverse institutional medical system once resorted to by a considerable proportion of the sick poor. Analysis of workhouse medicine holds the potential to deepen historiographical understandings of the emergence and development of the Old and New Poor Law systems and simultaneously broaden knowledge of medical care available to the poorer classes. Commendably, Medicine and the Workhouse provides the first dedicated, monograph length study of health and medical activity in the workhouse with an emphasis on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English contexts. Contributions to the volume assess various themes. Among the most notable is Susannah Ottaway's analysis of the health of the aged in eighteenth-century workhouses. In many ways, the workhouse introduced an element of institutional care for the elderly that fitted uneasily with the disciplinary ethos of the Poor Law. Making use of a rare but invaluable type of source material, Alannah Tomkins' contribution assesses extant autobiographical material from individuals who once resided in the workhouse to provide an analysis of patient perspectives on medical relief provided under the Old Poor Law system. Perhaps surprisingly, Tomkins concludes that not all patients viewed workhouse medicine unfavourably, even despite its limited financial and practical resources. On the contrary, some patients fondly remembered the physicians who attended them and the treatment which they received. Workhouses also catered to the mentally ill. As Leonard Smith demonstrates, this was particularly the case in England before the implementation of a state-supported asylum network in the 1840s. …