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Abstract
Up to the mid-1950's most economic and social historians accepted that improved medical measures, notably the expansion of hospital facilities, made a significant contribution to population growth in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by helping to reduce mortality rates. In an article which first appeared in 1955, T. McKeown and R. G. Brown criticized what had become the ‘traditional’ view. Though the number of hospitals increased, and though there were advances in medical education and knowledge, such developments, McKeown and Brown suggested, were of little value to the population until reflected in improvements in the standards of treatment available. ‘In assessing the contribution of hospitals to the reduction of mortality’, they argued, ‘we are less concerned with the number of beds than with the results of treatment of the patients who occupied them’.
The material contained in this article is based on S. Cherry, ‘The Role of a Provincial Hospital in the late 18th and 19th Centuries’, unpublished M.A. Dissertation submitted to the University of East Anglia in 1971. This work is now being expanded into a doctoral thesis on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English provincial hospitals. I am grateful to Dr. N. L. Tranter for his help and advice both on the dissertation and this article, and to Dr. R. G. Wilson for reading an earlier draft of the article.
The material contained in this article is based on S. Cherry, ‘The Role of a Provincial Hospital in the late 18th and 19th Centuries’, unpublished M.A. Dissertation submitted to the University of East Anglia in 1971. This work is now being expanded into a doctoral thesis on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English provincial hospitals. I am grateful to Dr. N. L. Tranter for his help and advice both on the dissertation and this article, and to Dr. R. G. Wilson for reading an earlier draft of the article.
Notes
The material contained in this article is based on S. Cherry, ‘The Role of a Provincial Hospital in the late 18th and 19th Centuries’, unpublished M.A. Dissertation submitted to the University of East Anglia in 1971. This work is now being expanded into a doctoral thesis on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English provincial hospitals. I am grateful to Dr. N. L. Tranter for his help and advice both on the dissertation and this article, and to Dr. R. G. Wilson for reading an earlier draft of the article.