ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relate Habermas’s concept of burgerliche Offentlichkeit, the ‘bourgeois public sphere’, to the voluntary hospitals of eighteenth-century England, and particularly to the origins of such hospitals. In the long term the voluntary hospitals acquired massive importance, in both their medical and charitable aspects. The proposed Hospital was called ‘General’ to demonstrate that its benefits would be available to all, just to natives of Birmingham or for that matter of Warwickshire, and the reference to ‘the populous country about it’ alluded to the fact that Birmingham’s hinterland extended to Staffordshire, Worcestershire and to some extent Shropshire. The participation of both Warwickshire MPs draws attention to a curious and significant feature of the Hospital’s landed support: despite the care of its activists to represent it as a regional initiative, a county-specific one, almost all of its ‘country’ benefactors hailed from Warwickshire.
