Medicine, Charity and Mutual Aid

The Consumption of Health and Welfare in Britain, c.1550–1950

Peter Shapely, Anne Borsay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754651482
• eBook ISBN: 9781317098256
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• General Editor’s Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 ‘Pressed down by want and afflicted with poverty, wounded and maimed in war or worn down with age?’ Cathedral almsmen in England 1538–1914
• 3 From common rights to cold charity: enclosure and poor allotments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
• 4 Kinship and welfare in early modern England: sometimes charity begins at home
• 5 Deaf children and charitable education in Britain 1790–1944
• 6 Joseph Townend and the Manchester Infirmary: a plebeian patient in the Industrial Revolution
• 7 Investigating the ‘deserving’ poor: charity and the voluntary hospitals in nineteenth-century Birmingham
• 8 Choice and the children’s hospital: Great Ormond Street Hospital patients and their families 1855–1900
• 9 Mental health care and charity for the middling sort: Holloway Sanatorium 1885–1900
• 10 Urban tuberculosis patients and sanatorium treatment in the early twentieth century
• 11 Power and accountability in the voluntary hospitals of Middlesbrough 1900–1948
• 12 The Co-operative Men’s Guild, citizenship and the limits of mutual aid 1911–1960
• 13 Retelling the stories of clients of voluntary social work agencies in Britain after 1945
• Index