A model of its kind

Hospitals are instititions; they are also agglomerations of dispersed buildings. At any given time, all of these will be variously declared inadequate, under construction, having something tacked on, or altered to some different, generally lowlier, purpose. Plans are commissioned, and the money runs out; new plans are drawn up. The constant to-ing and fro-ing of the builders is difficult to control within the strictly chronological framework generally favoured by historians in this genre. The format has other drawbacks too: changing attitudes to venereal diseases are well illustrated at Swansea, for example, but even the best index cannot substitute for occasional summaries and glances forward and back. The importance of books like these lies in their authors' fidelity to the primary sources, and the intelligence with which they synthesize them. The citation of these sources presents a problem: Davies points out that, as more than 1,200 references are made to documents in his book, it would be impossible to footnote them all. Consistent footnoting does, however, have the advantage of keeping the reader informed as to when, precisely, something happened without reducing the text to a staccato list of dates. Chronological "headers" of the sort sometimes found in biographies could also be useful. The title of Wyman's book is oddly punctuated; it is the history of medical care in what is now a London suburb. The surviving Fulham parish records date from 1625; and it is at this point that he could free himself from the secondary sources, although his book makes excellent use of these throughout and is particularly strong on Fulham's figurative and literal relationships with the wider world. And very salutary stuff the parish records yield. Medical men were contracted to the Fulham workhouse (founded in the 1 730s, it enjoyed purpose-built accommodation after 1774) after the submission of tenders; the paupers of Fulham had access to outside specialists who did not always donate their services, as did the eye doctor Baron de Wenzel. One of the most interesting sections concerns the parish's relationship with the voluntary and special hospitals, the "Salvation" (salivating) ward at St Thomas's; Bedlam and the Hoxton madhouses. in the 1920s its infirmary, built in 1916, became St Peter's Hospital. As these changes of name suggest, it was the sick wards of the workhouse that eventually dominated its business-the same happened in Fulham-although Bedford's casual wards were open until 1949. In October 1922, 326 …