ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests the broadening activities of the House, intersected with a growth in charitable foundations that supported advances in paediatric medicine and surgery and the foundation of specialist hospitals in London. The chapter concentrates primarily on the orthopaedic cases, although reference will also be made to children with other conditions. The Orthopaedic Institution had also treated 500 patients. Owsei Temkin sees its foundation as part of the process whereby people with epilepsy began to be distinguished from patients with mental illnesses, although the aetiology of the disease the hospital set out to treat was by no means understood. Although Temkin argues that from the first half of the nineteenth century major trends in neurological medicine were characterized by enthusiasm for 'pathological anatomy, clinical observation and an appreciation of statistical data', neurological disease appeared, and more intractable and disturbing than those conditions which affected the skeleton and whose largely mechanical malfunctions were more easily understood.
