4 - The Foul Disease and the Poor Law: Workhouse Medicine in the Eighteenth Century

Summary

On August 22, 1728, Flora Price applied to her churchwardens in the parish of St. Margaret’s Westminster. When questioned by the overseer’s of the poor she admitted that she was poxed and sought their help. The clerk recorded that she “be admitted into ye House till such time she can be got into ye Hospital for cure of the foul distemper.” However, she never entered a hospital. Instead, it seems she entered the workhouse and underwent mercury treatment there. Following her salivation she was discharged on October 21. The workhouse committee ordered “That Flora Price be discharged ye house & to have some old cloaths & to be sent to Bridewell upon any new Application.” Such stories are ubiquitous in eighteenth-century parochial records. Workhouse admission records register the admission of sick paupers week in and week out throughout the entire eighteenth century. Given the great prevalence of the pox one should not be surprised to learn that foul patients like Flora Price were ever-present in these institutions.

Yet the medical role of the eighteenth-century workhouse has received little attention. Studies of early modern English medical institutions have generally focused on the large hospitals like St. Bartholomew’s and St.Thomas’s or on the growing number of private specialist charities like the Lock Hospital. Yet, in parochial workhouse infirmaries there existed an important level of institutional health care for the very poor. Many paupers like Flora Price did not run immediately to a hospital when they became ill. Often their first stop (or their last resting place) was the workhouse.

Over the past decades social historians have tirelessly explored the massive landscape of English parochial records, which has yielded a wealth of rich data on the English poor. However, too few early modern medical historians have mined this body of material, much of which concerns issues related to health and healing. Focusing on a single disease in these institutions allows access to the much larger issue of eighteenth-century workhouse medicine, which still awaits proper investigation. Overall, the assumption continues that the medicalization of workhouses was a nineteenth-century phenomenon and a product of the New Poor Law. Just one example is the recent reaction to evidence of medical care in London workhouses from 1837, which, we read, “was important from an early date.”