Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the consumption as opposed to the production of charitable assistance, medical care, parish poor relief and mutual aid, focusing on the perspectives of those who received support in urban environments. According to historical orthodoxy, the rise of modern medicine from the later eighteenth century disempowered patients who in the early modern period had bargained with doctors in a commercial market place. The book shows with reference to cathedral almsmen in England between 1538 and 1914. It examines a sanatorium for insane patients, so-called to lessen the stigma that the term asylum conveyed for the middle classes. This book reveals for the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London during the second half of the nineteenth century. It considers sanatoriums for working-class patients with the physical condition of tuberculosis.