ABSTRACT
The hospitals that serve most English towns and cities had their origins in previous centuries. They reflect in durable brick and mortar and in almost equally durable professional organisation, the requirements of a population very different from that which lives in England today. Centrally placed and carrying high kudos is the former ‘voluntary’ or ‘acute’ hospital wish an established expectation that patients are accepted with acute illnesses from which they will die or recover in response to treatment. Elsewhere, often in a poorer part of the town, the chronic sickness hospital has performed loyal service to those unfortunates struck down by tuberculosis or other similarly debilitating illness. Further off again, maybe in the local countryside or a distant moor, the County Asylum is whispered of with awe and known to children as a place of nightmares and fascinating chastisement.
