Persons Out of Place: Seclusion and Scandal in the Workhouse Hospital

Abstract

This chapter sketches a history of workhouse scandals that gave rise to the Metropolitan Asylums Board and that continued to mark tensions between the institutional care of sick persons and the body-disciplining ideology of the Poor Law. It emphasizes pauperism’s place within a system of deterrence, deprivation, and degradation and details how this was dramatically expressed at the Hampstead Smallpox Hospital, where revelations concerning poor conditions captivated the London press in 1871. This episode shows how illness could be strategically employed to destabilize the official meanings and practices of pauperism. In seeking to present themselves as patients not paupers, former inmates demonstrated the sick body’s ability to disrupt the punitive rationality of the workhouse. The scandal conspicuously problematized the relationship between the public infectious disease hospital and the Poor Law.