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A lesson from the history of psychiatry: competitive tendering for services and defective central heating systems in Georgian New Bethlem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Robert Howard
Robert Howard*
Affiliation:
The Maudsley Hospital, Denmark Hill, London SE5 8AZ
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Entries in the minute books of the New Bethlem Hospital Building Committee from 1813–1816 contain details of the commissioning, installation and subsequent extensive modification of a system for heating the hospital. The system adopted was chosen principally for its cheapness, but in a manner that may seem familiar in the current climate of competitive tendering, with adoption of the cheapest proposal; through the incompetence of its manufacturer it was to prove problematic and dangerous.

Type
Sketches from the history of psychiatry
Information
Psychiatric Bulletin , Volume 15 , Issue 9 , September 1991 , pp. 566 - 568
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1991
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