ABSTRACT
In 1886 Guy’s Hospital launched its first public appeal for voluntary contributions from Mansion House.1 The previous six years had been anxious ones for the hospital. In 1880 Guy’s had faced a virtual state of “civil war” over the introduction of a new system of nursing; the internal conflict that resulted brought into question the hospital’s management and increased demands for a public enquiry into London’s voluntary hospitals.2 The onset of the agricultural depression in the late 1870s reduced the hospital’s income from its landed estates that had since the mid-nineteenth century provided over 90 per cent of its funding. In 1883, under pressure from the Charity Commission which curtailed the hospital’s ability to borrow and questioned the governors’ financial management, the governors took the unpopular step of admitting paying patients.3 The public appeal three years later ended a series of desperate attempts to reverse the hospital’s precarious financial fortunes. Ten years later the governors launched a further public appeal. Guy’s Hospital, which contemporaries considered one of London’s great endowed hospitals and so independent of charitable funding, had finally entered the highly competitive benevolent economy at a time when many other London hospitals were extending their financial base away from philanthropy.
