Best Websites
Jonathan Scott tracks down websites for finding records from medical institutions
Uncover relations’ experiences in hospitals and asylums
The institutions that once housed the sick, destitute or unstable were often vast, self-sufficient communities that generated huge quantities of paperwork. While the survival of archives is patchy, these can be rich seams for family historians to mine. Before the creation of the National Health Service in 1948, there were various types of care – private institutions, charitable hospitals or dispensaries, and those operated through the local Poor Law. The 1808 County Asylums Act and 1845 Lunacy Act established statutory public county asylums. As a result, records tend to reside at local and county archives – indeed the London Metropolitan Archives has material from 80 hospitals.
This issue we’re looking at all records relating to hospitals and asylums, featuring both staff and patients. Remember that while staff records may be open to all, most patient records are closed for 100 years. And if you are interested in the careers of nurses, doctors or surgeons, there are various resources relating to the training and education of medical professionals.
THE WELLCOME LIBRARY
w wellcomelibrary.org/collections/archive-guides/hospitals The Wellcome Trust sits behind a host of mass-digitisation, cataloguing and heritage projects relating to the history of healthcare, medical heritage and treatment. This URL leads to the Wellcome Library’s in-depth source guides listing material relating to hospitals held in the library’s own catalogue. Using this tool you can confine your searches to hospitals in London; the rest of the UK and Ireland; armed-forces hospitals; or hospitals overseas. The site is also home to countless articles, exhibitions, image collections and ready-digitised archives. So via the Mental Healthcare page ( bit.ly/wellcome-mental) you can see the results of a joint project to digitise over 800,000 pages of archival material from various psychiatric institutions.
HISTORIC HOSPITAL ADMISSION RECORDS PROJECT
w hharp.org
This long-running website houses details of more than 140,000 children admitted to four hospitals in London and Glasgow between 1852 and 1921. The records tell you the name and age of the child, where they came from, and the date and reason for their admission. More recent additions include admission records from the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Glasgow, which joined entries from the Hospital for Sick Children at Great Ormond Street, the Evelina Hospital and the Alexandra Hospital for Children with Hip Disease. Basic searches return various results, but you will need to register to see more detailed material such as case notes.
HOSPITAL RECORDS
w bit.ly/data-gov-uk-hospitals
The free website data.gov.uk publishes a range of data held by central Government, local authorities and public bodies. This particular page reproduces information from the mothballed Hospital Records Database created by The National Archives and Wellcome Library (still online at bit.ly/tna-hosp). It was developed to help locate records from more than 2,800 hospitals across the UK, and includes administrative details of the hospitals; their status or type; their location; and the dates of available administrative and clinical records. You should also be able to see if there are any lists, catalogues or other finding aids relating to the hospital you are researching.
MUSEUM OF THE MIND
w museumofthemind.org.uk
The Museum of the Mind preserves the archives of three London psychiatric hospitals: Bethlem Royal Hospital, Maudsley Hospital and Warlingham Park Hospital. Via the catalogue you can view digital images of selected documents, and get to grips with the kinds of records that survive for staff. These include registers, salary books, conduct records and pension schemes, as well as minutes and papers relating to social and sports clubs. It’s always worth seeing if records of the hospital that interests you have been made available via commercial partners – many of the staff and patient records held here can be accessed on Findmypast ( findmypast.co.uk/bethlem).
THE RETREAT ARCHIVE
w york.ac.uk/borthwick/resources/retreat
The Borthwick Institute for Archives holds a wide range of important collections, not least the archive of The Retreat, a pioneering mental heath hospital that opened in York in 1796. Here you can explore more than 650,000 digitised images hosted by the Wellcome Collection via the Borthwick Catalogue. The archive is unusually complete and includes administrative, financial, staff, estate and patient records, and consists of bound volumes, loose papers, maps, photographs and paintings. Note that patient records dating from 1920 to the present day were excluded from the digitisation project, for reasons of data protection.