ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses a hitherto neglected subject by looking at the relationship between the families of patients at a Victorian childrens hospital, and the management and medical staff of the institution. The material for this study comes from the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street (GOSH), in London, the first successful paediatric hospital in Britain. The primary aim was the medical and surgical treatment of poor children, with medical advice offered to those number admitted to the institution. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, state and medical experts once more attest to the view that home and the family environment is preferable to a separate institution for the sick child. In between, hospitalized children, removed from their domestic environment for considerable periods of time, and subject to increasingly technical treatment regimes, became a notable feature of medical life in Britain.
