The Victorian Hospital

Nowadays most seriously ill people would want to go to hospital. But the experience of a sick person in the 1830s was completely different. There were few hospitals and the treatment available was hardly an improvement on being nursed at home. However, during the Victorian period there was a massive expansion in the number of hospitals in Britain and they were increasingly the focus of health care and medical education. This book describes the different types of hospitals and the changes that took place to make them more like the establishments we are familiar with today. About the author Lavinia Mitton is a graduate of the University of Oxford and specialised in the social history of medicine. She wrote this book while writing a doctoral thesis in the history of social policy.