Hospitals And Charity

"Drawing on a comparative study of hospital records, Charity and the London Hospitals investigates how and why Victorians contributed in order to show that benevolence was rarely amenable to a single form or reason. Whilst charity remained central to the hospitals' raison d'etre, philanthropy's contribution was modified at a financial and administrative level as hospitals shifted from being philanthropic to medical institutions. Why this process occurred and the impact of professionalisation and scientific medicine are assessed."--BOOK JACKET.

First went the power. Then came the water, and for five days, the country's oldest hospital was under siege. The never-before-told story of the heroic doctors, nurses, and patients who fought to survive Hurricane Katrina at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. This book traces a remarkable five-day transformation of an infirm institution, caught in a sea of death and indifference, into an island of care and tenderness. The hour-by-hour recreation of this hospital's final days is one of the most grievous and heroic stories in American history. Jim Carrier, who moved to New Orleans 28 days before Katrina (and lost his home), recreates with emotional and poignant detail the rich, sad and uplifting saga of Charity Hospital.

This is the first book in English to provide a comprehensive examination of the hospital movement that arose and prospered in northern Italy between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. Throughout this flourishing urbanised area hundreds of independent semi-religious facilities appeared, offering care for the ill, the poor and pilgrims en route to holy sites in Rome and the eastern Mediterranean. Over three centuries they became mechanisms for the appropriation of civic authority and political influence in the communities they served, and created innovative experiments in healthcare and poor relief which are the precursors to modern social welfare systems. Will appeal to students and lecturers in medieval, social, religious, and urban history and includes a detailed appendix that will assist researchers in the field.

Through stories of achievements, challenges and calamities at five large public hospitals in the United States, the author shows that medical excellence resides where few people expect to find it ... and how those centers are threatened by misplaced public priorities and political mythologies.--

In this illuminating social history of medicine and charity in Ireland over almost 150 years from 1718 until just after the Great Famine, Laurence M. Geary shows how illness and poverty reacted upon each other. The poverty resulting from great population growth that continued until the arrival of potato blight in 1845 had a severe effect on the health of the country's population, and the Famine itself caused around one million deaths from starvation and disease. This was a period of great change in medical and charitable services. In the eighteenth century the sick had come to be regarded as the deserving poor, therefore having a better claim to public assistance than those whose poverty was the result of their own dissipation, idleness or vice. A network of charities evolved in Ireland to provide free medical aid to the sick poor. The first voluntary hospital in Dublin opened in 1718 and Geary traces the establishment and development of voluntary hospitals and county infirmaries throughout the country.These had a strong Anglican ethos and bias, but after Catholic emancipation in 1829 the nepotism, sectarianism and divisive politics that were rife in these organisations came under increasing scrutiny. Medical practitioners saw considerable progress in the development of a regulated profession. Geary describes developments in policy making and legislation, culminating in the 1851 Medical Charities Act, which he describes as part of a process that characterised the century and more under review in this book: the unrelenting pressure on philanthropy and private medical charity and the inexorable shift from voluntarism to an embryonic system of state medicine.

An account of dramatic changes in hospital care in turn-of-the-century New York, first published in 1982.