Children and hospitals in eighteenth-century provincial English and Scottish towns. (360G-Wellcome-081351_Z_06_Z)

'Children and hospitals in eighteenth century provincial English and Scottish towns' The pilot project will establish the feasibility of a larger scale investigation into child health and the hospital movement in eighteenth century English and Scottish provincial towns. This is a significant topic given the almost total neglect of children as a category of the sick population in this period, and especially outside London. Clearly a growing interest in child health from medical practitioners, and the beneficence of individual subscribers over-rode the blanket exclusion of the young. An examination of how children were catered for in hospitals will be a valuable addition to our understanding of hospital aims and functions, as well as attitudes towards child health. The project has three immediate aims: To establish how far and how uniformly hospital admission records recorded patients' ages, and how commonly children were treated in hospitals in different towns. This will enable me to analyse how far the young were integrated into the growing system of general hospital care. To investigate how far the treatment of children was related to the aims and interests of specific doctors or benefactors, or to the ideals of individual institutions at their foundations. This will be accessed via the hospitals' own literature, and any surviving case notes. By casting the geographical net widely (using all extant registers), I will be able to assess whether and how far ideals and practices differed at different institutions, or whether we can discern a common trend in the treatment of sick children. To address how far it is possible to draw distinctions, between in-patient and out-patient care, as it has proved to be for Northampton, and how far child patients were treated differently from adults, both socially and medically. How far were children admitted on the basis of 'interesting' conditions, and how far were they treated solely on medical need? Were they housed with adult patients, and were expectations of their behaviour the same?