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

Abstract

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.