Hospitals for the excluded or convalescent homes?: workhouses, medicalization and the poor law in long eighteenth-century London and Pre-Confederation Toronto.

Workhouses proliferated throughout England and the British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their role in increasingly institutionalized welfare systems has been well studied. Less attention has come to focus on their considerable medical services. Large infirmaries within English workhouses can be found by the early eighteenth century, providing crucial medical care to the very poor. However, levels of workhouse medicalization varied greatly throughout the Atlantic world. This article compares the medical services of workhouses in London with the one established in Pre-Confederation Toronto to assess how and why their medical histories diverge so greatly.

The new Poor Law guardians and the administration of insanity in East London, 1834-1844.

One of the main aims of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 was to impose national consistency of practice in poor relief. Central guidance was designed to produce uniformity in guardians' policies on dealing with the insane. This study of the administration of insanity in the eastern metropolis in the first decade after the Act demonstrates that the new boards of guardians were as culturally distinctive in their style of administration of the new Poor Law as the parishes had been under the old regime. A complex interplay of personality, politics, and class determined the corporate culture of individual boards.