ABSTRACT
The later 1860s and the 1870s saw debates about the fate of unschooled children, landless labourers and the role of the churches in the community. Middle-class values about a respectable society were also applied to review existing social welfare provisions. The various official enquiries into hospital services which were carried out from the 1860s to the 1880s in the Australian colonies permit some discussion of what the existing general facilities were like for the recipient, or now more correctly, the patient. What the critics wanted, and what they were getting between 1870 and 1890, were hospital facilities marching with the times, times which were increasingly dominated by middle-class notions of respectable civilisation. Responding to a different motivation, the Sisters of Charity established St Vincent's Hospital in 1858 at Potts Point, Sydney, which was moved to Darlinghurst in 1870, and thereafter steadily extended.
