Hospital Saturday, workplace collections and issues in late nineteenth-century hospital funding

Abstract

The themes of continuity and change remain essential to an understanding of the durability of the voluntary hospital system from the eighteenth century to the establishment of the National Health Service. The voluntary hospitals provided much of the physical fabric and organized medical effort for the intended national hospital system and remained reliant upon grand philanthropic gestures, particularly for capital projects.' Like the old hammer with a new head and a different shaft, the familiarity of the system on the eve of the Second World War was deceptive. Eighteenth-century principles of free treatment by honorary medical staff for the sick poor under subscriber-recommendation systems had very largely been replaced by the expectation of some form of payment for treating a wider social clientele of patients, including private cases, and local authority contract work, for which the honorary medical staff were paid.