ABSTRACT
The creation of the Local Government Board in 1871 was intended to provide a national mechanism which would offer new opportunities to improve the public’s health, including through the creation of municipal hospitals. These were initially established as isolation hospitals to treat patients with infectious diseases. However, their adoption by local authorities appears to have been piecemeal throughout England and Wales prior to the First World War. A quote from Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s 1910 book, The State and the Doctor, provides a useful way into what is a rather complex and under-researched area of British medical and economic history. The Webb’s frustration at their inability to obtain information on municipal hospitals is clear:1
It is somewhat remarkable that there is neither systematic governmental inspection nor central audit of . . . municipal hospitals. In the absence of this inspection and audit the Town Councils are in practice, quite free. Beyond sanctioning the loans for hospitals under the Public Health Acts, the Local Government Board, we understand, has no other official knowledge of this branch of civic activity than it can glean from its own Local Taxation Returns, and from reading the Annual reports of the 1800 Medical Officers of Health with which it is supplied but which it does not for publication summarise or review statistically. There appears to be no official statement of how many sanitary authorities, or what proportion of the whole, either maintain their own hospitals, or make arrangements to use other hospitals, or make no provision at all.
