Family Care and Hospital Care

Previous studies of the links between, on the one hand, the household and family background in the community, and on the other, the utilization of hospitals in Britain have concentrated on the Eighteenth century and earlier and emphasized the relative lack of community ties of those utilizsing hospitals. This paper explores these links in a nineteenth–century industrial city by focussing on fever patients in 1871 in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary the only major general voluntary hospital in the city. The supply of hospital accommodation for fever patients also included provision under the poor law authority. The demand in 1871 was high due to the relapsing fever epidamic. The paper discusses the methodological potential and pitfalls involved in the record linkage of information about patients in hospital admission registers with information in hospital annual reports and especially with family and household information in census enumerators' books. The analysis suggests that it was the self–help of the patients who were employees and the self–interest of companies rather than civic responsibility or individual philanthropy which accounted for the utilization of the Infirmary by fever patients 1871. Furthermore, family and household background remained important; most patients, including lodgers were related to at least one other member of their household. In Glasglow in the 1870s it was necessary for a fever victim to be tightly integrated into,rather than outside the community in order to utilize the Infirmary

Census · Environmental health · Family medicine · Family member · Population · Sociology · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Medicine · Demography