“Mr. Treasurer” — the Real Power

Hospitals and care for the poor in the 19th Century were provided by charitable institutions which were supported by generous benefactors. The rich paid for their own doctors and care at home. It was all very rudimentary.

By the late 19th Century, London was teeming with people who were jammed into overcrowded, filthy and insanitary conditions. Those in work were often injured in the course of their work. Poverty drove many women and children to prostitution and disease.

London Slums in 1872 in the Whitechapel area

Drunkenness and malnourishment were rife. Consequently, the demand for bigger hospitals and more care, and more funds, escalated year on year. It was getting out of control. This placed great burdens on the benefactors so those in charge of local hospitals held fund-raising events, flag days, and vied with each other to have the patronage of members of “Society”, titled and connected people, and above all, wealthy people.

As the funds flowed in, and their disbursements became more complicated, hospitals found themselves in need of more than a lowly clerk or local churchman to administer the monies. Continue reading →

Lawyers, the Model Profession

Lawyers in 19th Century London were members of one of the four prestigious Inns of Court: Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn, Middle and Inner Temple Inns.  The Inns were places of education, training and development, and residence, for lawyers, which could trace their history back to mediaeval times.  They flourished as places of learning, enjoyed much royal patronage, and provided many scholarly lawyers to serve in the great Offices of State, especially under the Tudor Kings and Queens.

Lincoln’s Inn Court, London

The College of Physicians, formed under King Henry VIII, not surprisingly, modelled itself on these colleges of lawyers, and adopted their training methods: “see & do” under the supervision of a qualified lawyer with whom you worked and dined in “family” groups known as chambers.  For the medics, these training and dining groups were known as “firms”.

By the late 19th Century, the Inns and their members, called barristers, were well-established, and the lawyers were recognised as professional men.

Royal Courts of Justice, The Strand, London

The Inns were located to the west of the City of London clustered around the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, and in close walking distance to Newgate Prison and the Old Bailey Courthouse where our trial took place. Continue reading →

From Quacks to Professional Men

From ancient times, quackery, prayers, and traditional poultices and herbalism, were the medics’ tools of trade alongside crude surgery and bleeding.

Then came the Enlightenment when anatomy, science and an understanding of how the body works changed everything.  By the early 1800s, a substantial body of knowledge had started to develop which required medical practitioners to train and learn in organised schools with experienced teachers.

The Teaching Hospital and the concept of Lecturers were born.  And so it was at Queen’s.

It had distinguished the function of caring and treating from teaching and training by recognising and building a separate, but on-site, Medical School with its own Dean.  It was not a separate entity in law – its finances and administration were very much part of Queen’s, and its benefactors.  The administrator, known as the Treasurer, was all important but the medics started to get organised.

At the same time, the law changed.  The state recognised the desirability of having an authorised body to ensure that medical practitioners were suitably qualified, and had passed their exams, thus the Royal College of Physicians (instigated under King Henry VIII) was boosted and became that body. Continue reading →

Life in the Late 19th Century

19th Century London was grey and drab, and very grim for all but the lucky, and the wealthy. Open sewers and poor drainage, filthy streets and houses, dung piles, and lack of ventilation and fresh air, formed London’s insanitary living conditions.

The resulting stench was added to by the ubiquitous pong of rotting bodies as disposal of the dead became more difficult, especially with the capital’s burgeoning population.

Cleanliness was a problem. Indeed, for “the great unwashed” bodily dirt was a point of pride as it showed you were an honest worker. Disease was the result. Cholera, typhus, smallpox, tuberculosis and leprosy all took their toll. Fog and smoke exacerbated people’s pitiful living conditions. Life was very hard for most. Continue reading →

“Quick.  Quick.  We’ll be late” Laura cried breathlessly as she tried to hold on to her hat as she and Jeanie, her best friend, ran across London Bridge to catch the omnibus from the north side stop, to travel west along Cheapside to the Bailey.  They didn’t want to be late for the first day of the trial of their friend and colleague, Katy McNiel.

It was a fine summer’s day in the late 1800s and Katy was to be tried for the manslaughter of one of her patients at London’s famous Queen’s Hospital.

Cheapside was one of the main west-east roads across the north bank of the Thames in London.  The road was a crush everywhere with horse drawn taxis, private carriages and omnibuses jostling for space on the all too inadequate road. 

Pedestrians were often pushed to the sides of the filthy streets by the traffic where they tried to avoid the ubiquitous horse dung that was left from the moment it had dropped on the road until it was collected by the night sweepers. In the heat of the day, the stench was overpowering in this part of east London. 

And the dust and filth, and the over crowding – life in the city was all very unpleasant.

Continue reading →