London Foundling Hospital Research Articles

The Spectral Hospital: Eighteenth-Century Philanthropy and the Novel

Established in 1739 as a shelter for illegitimate children of the poor otherwise liable to be murdered by their parents or abandoned in the streets to certain death, the London Foundling Hospital loomed large in eighteenthcentury cultural imagination.1 It embodied both the noblest philanthropic aspirations of the British Enlightenment and some of its worst fears, namely that unchecked by the stigma of illicit maternity, women would gain an unprecedented control over their reputations and reproductive behavior. Straightforward praises, such as Henry Fielding’s “compliment to the present Age for [this] glorious [Benefaction],” mingled with such underhand commendations as the one voiced by a 1760 anonymous pamphlet that assured the “young Maids” that now they “may safely take a Leap in the dark with their Sweethearts; and if they should chance to be with child, . . . they may go to the Foundling Hospital and get rid of their Bantling, and pass for pure Virgins.”2 It was widely rumored, moreover, that the reason any man would champion the case of this charity was that he hoped to swindle the public into paying for the upkeep of his own bastards; a 1750 pamphlet claimed that the Hospital’s founding father, Captain Thomas Coram, worked so hard on behalf of illegitimate children because he “had many a Lass grappl’d under the Lee.”3 The institution’s vulnerability to slander notwithstanding, the visit to the beautifully appointed grounds of

Testing the Waters

wooden panels on which were displayed actual human veins, arteries and nerves. Donated to the young Royal Society in 1667, the panels were seen as works of art as much as tools for learning and teaching. Even in 1702 Evelyn was still stressing their literal, static qualities. The conflict between rationalism and empiricism is illu minated through an account of the personal war between Dr John Woodward and Dr Richard Mead, the former drawing on the accumulated wisdom and reputation rep resented by his collection of ancient texts, the latter relying on observation and practical efficacy, although at the risk of straying into quackery. In spite of his attitude to medicine, Mead was a prodigious antiquary who at his death owned 180 works by 90 artists and was responsible, with Hans Sloane and others (notably William Hogarth), for establishing London's Foundling Hospital (the first public art gallery in Britain). It was Sloane's collection of plants, animals, coins and other antiquities that formed the first core of the British Museum (1753) and, later, the Natu ral History Museum, just as John Radcliffe's library formed the core of Oxford University's Radcliffe Camera. Thankfully, the concentrated and demand ing text?liberally sprinkled with arcane language?is lightened by 10 excellent colour plates, including several of Evelyn's panels, and 62 black and white figures, just a few of which suffer from either their unsuitability for photography or a lack of con trast in printing. With 70 pages of notes, plus references, The English virtuoso informs rather than entertains but it richly rewards the effort that has to be put into its reading.

The origins of the children of the London Foundling Hospital, 1741–1760: a reconsideration

The infants left at the London Foundling Hospital in the first twenty years of its operation have generally been classed as illegitimate. This study examines some of the characteristics of the children who entered the hospital between 1741 and 1760, and points to a far larger component of legitimate infants than has previously been suspected, up to a third being born in wedlock. The backgrounds of the children varied considerably, as did the reasons for their abandonment, with a stress on personal and economic misfortune for both married and single parents. The higher level of legitimacy among the foundlings than has been thought has implications for the illegitimacy ratio of London, pointing to relatively low levels, in common with those found for the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

Sexual knowledge and children's literature: William Blake's songs of innocence and of experience and Jamila Gavin's Coram boy

Today's educator is in the difficult position of deciding what to teach adolescents; indeed, is sometimes essentially silenced by proscription of the topic. William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience and Jamila Gavin's Coram Boy might help a teacher approach the topic of sexuality. William Blake's Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) must be understood in the light of the then newly emerging genre of children's literature. Yet the subject matter, sexuality, drinking, child labour and poverty, might be thought sometimes to be inappropriate for children. His poems and images are often drawn from other contexts and often have an ironic meaning. In particular, the Calvinist children's teachings of Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley forged strong reactions in Blake. The Charity School Movement and the establishment of charitable institutions like orphanages assumed an authoritarian stance over poor children. Blake challenges the assumptions of his culture through his poems. Jamila Gavin's adolescent novel Coram Boy won the Whitbread prize in 2000. The plot centres around one charity that also figures in Blake's Songs: the London Foundling Hospital (founded by Thomas Coram). Teenage premarital sex, illegitimate birth, violence and poverty are also featured. Gavin's novel comments on the staid atmosphere surrounding discussion of teenage sexuality in our, supposedly, sexually liberated society. Coram Boy and Songs reflect on each other in interesting ways, and a consideration of their themes is instructive in finding a way to teach both in the literature classroom.

Received, a Blank Child: John Brownlow, Charles Dickens, and the London Foundling Hospital - Archives and Fictions

Received, a Blank Child: John Brownlow, Charles Dickens, and the London Foundling Hospital - Archives and Fictions

"Objects of Charity": Petitions to the London Foundling Hospital, 1768-72

England was peculiar among the leading European countries of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in not having a major hospital devoted to the care of abandoned babies and young children. By 1700, many other countries had such a facility, usually established in their principal cities: institutions of this sort were to be found in Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, and Venice. Although London had Christ's Hospital, founded in the reign of Edward VI, an institution that in the first half-century of its existence admitted some foundling children, it soon transformed itself into a refuge and school for the legitimate offspring of freemen of the city of London. By the late seventeenth century, the Hospital had a notice posted near its gates, stating These are to certify that no child or children who are dropped in Christ's Hospital can receive any benefit from thence.' The establishment of a true foundling hospital was impeded by hostility to bastard-bearers, and by Tudor poor laws that vested responsibility for the nurture of abandoned babies and children in the parishes in which they were found.2

On Tiny Tim, Charles Dickens, and Pediatrics

Sir .—Using retrospective diagnosis, Lewis, 1 in the December 1992 issue of AJDC , hypothesizes a case of distal renal tubule acidosis (RTA) (type 1) in Charles Dickens' beloved literary character, Tiny Tim, 2 and provides excellent documentation of how London's working poor lived and the types of medical treatments and measures available in the 1840s. However, there are three critical points on Dickens and medicine that Lewis should consider beyond the case of Tiny Tim that would better substantiate the British novelist, rather than a 20th-century commentator, as an astute and accurate medical observer. The first point is to recall that Dickens was fascinated with all aspects of humanity, including the propensity to illness. A strong supporter of public health, medical, and sanitation reforms, Dickens was a frequent visitor to hospitals and helped raise large amounts of money for London's Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, the London Foundling Hospital,

The London Foundling Hospital and its Significance as a Child-Saving Institution

This article explores the Foundling Hospital's ideology as a child-rescue institution, particularly in terms of the actualisation of the Lockeian ideal of a working school. Consideration is given to the development of the institution's ‘useful’ curriculum; the building's design as a part of a system of surveillance and control; its use as an experimental laboratory for radical pediatrics; and its particular methods of institutionalised child socialisation, all of which were widely imitated elsewhere. It is argued that the Foundling became a showcase of approved childhood to satisfy the interests and curiosity of the English ruling classes. The relationship between particular cultural interests and the institution as a charity are explored, as well as its administrative structure as an example for other later child-saving institutions in the English-speaking world, including Australia. The lasting and continuing impact of this seminal children's institution on Australian child welfare thought and practice is delineated.

Disease as Device: The Role of Smallpox in Bleak House

^Disease as Device: The Role of Smallpox in Bleak House Michael S. Gurney A discussion of fictive ills in Bleak House is particularly appropriate. Disease is a central theme throughout the novel, and many illnesses are depicted: smallpox, stroke, gout, epilepsy, senile dementia, paraplegia, psychiatric disease, and an equilibrium disorder that was probably the first description of Meniere's disease. Moreover, the sodety of Bleak House is itself diseased. Dickens adopts the posture of sodal pathologist and dissects his nation, finding decay at every level. He often uses disease as a physical manifestation and consequence of sodety's sickness. One illness in particular—smallpox—appears throughout the novel for diverse purposes. The recognized communicability is used to emphasize the need for graveyard reform. With impressive foresight, the scarred features of the novel's heroine effectively lobby for more widespread vaccination, the policy that would ultimately eradicate the disease over a century later. The spread of the infection is also used as a symbol to emphasize the connections between sodal classes in a callous, dehumanized sodety. Furthermore, the infection provides a crisis in the heroine 's life that Dickens uses in Carlyle's fashion to transform Esther from a naïve girl to a true Bildungsroman diaracter. The ability to use diverse disease manifestations so accurately and effectively implies a degree of medical knowledge surprising in a nineteenth -century novelist. However, there is much circumstantial evidence of Dickens's medical knowledge. His library contained many sdentific and medical books from the 1840s and 1850s. His close friends induded three prominent physidans: John Elliotson, John Connolly, and T. Southwood Smith. He worked hard for the creation and support of hospitals, raising money for the Children's Hospital on Great Ormond Street, and helping to establish the London Foundling Hospital and the Sanitorium of Devonshire Place House, a private hospital for single middle-income Literature and Medicine 9 (1990) 79-92 © 1990 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 80 DISEASE AS DEVICE Londoners.1 Dickens worked with Smith for medical-sodal reform, particularly for slum reform. He also regularly published articles and editorials about public health issues in his two weekly magazines, All the Year Round and Household Words. Even more convincing evidence of Dickens's medical knowledge is in his books themselves. The fictive ills given to his charaders are real diseases, not romantic swoons or lingering obscure fevers. The diseases are from Dickens's actual experience, carefully observed and painstakingly reproduced with definite signs and symptoms that progress in a logical sequence. His descriptions of disease are frequently superior to the medical texts of his day. The illnesses are realistic and challenging enough that Dickensian diagnoses are often the subjed of discussion in current medical journals. Many of Dickens's characters have now become classic examples of medical syndromes. His description in Pickwick Papers oÃ- Fat Joe, whose morbid obesity led to sleep apnea and narcolepsy, was penned years before this condition, now referred to as pickwickian syndrome, became widely recognized in medicine. His account in Great Expectations oÃ- Mrs. Garger^s symptoms after the assault by Orlick is fascinating. Her neurologic defidts correlate exactly with those areas of the brain—the back and side—that would have been injured in the surprise attack. The idea that certain areas of the brain controlled distinct functions was not widely known at the time of Great Expectations in 1861. Broca only that same year localized the area responsible for speech, and it was not until the next two decades that Meynert and Sir David Ferner performed their studies on brain anatomy and localization of sensory function to specific areas of the cortex.2 Dickens's descriptions of other neurologic disorders are classics . Sir Leicester Dedlock's stroke in Bleak House, Mrs. Skewton's recurrent strokes and deterioration in Dombey and Son, the grand mal seizure of Anthony Chuzzlewit, and the psychosis of Dr. Manette in A Tale of Two Cities are all remarkably accurate and insightful descriptions of such illnesses . In Bleak House, Dickens describes a peculiar disorder in Phil Squod, Mr. George's assistant. Phil cannot walk on his own without falling unless he leans one shoulder against the wall for support...

Ruth K. McClure. <italic>Coram's Children: The London Foundling Hospital in the Eighteenth Century</italic>. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1981. Pp. xiii, 321. $27.50

Ruth K. McClure. Coram's Children: The London Foundling Hospital in the Eighteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1981. Pp. xiii, 321. $27.50 Get access McClure Ruth K.. Coram's Children: The London Foundling Hospital in the Eighteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1981. Pp. xiii, 321. $27.50. R. S. Tompson R. S. Tompson University of Utah Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 87, Issue 4, October 1982, Pages 1087–1088, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/87.4.1087 Published: 01 October 1982

Pediatric Practice at the London Foundling Hospital

Pediatric Practice at the London Foundling Hospital

The London Foundling Hospital and Thomas Coram, 1737-1937

The London Foundling Hospital and Thomas Coram, 1737-1937