LONDON IN THE 18TH CENTURY / HEALTH AND DISEASE: HOSPITALS AND MEDICINE

The recovery of London expanded at a rapid pace after the Great Fire. As the city at the heart of the Age of Enlightenment, it was a consumer society par excellence with wealth and squalor side by side. It was a rough and ready time, elegant and refined: a time of passionate preaching and riotous disorder. This is the time of Robert Adam, Canaletto, William Hogarth and the Mob, and the course will illustrate the life that Londoners lived in every stratum of society.

Increasing populations and poverty inevitably spread disease through the century but state involvement in preventative or curative medicine was non-existent. But this was a time of the creation of numerous hospitals by private philanthropists, as Guy’s and the Middlesex and the refounding of St. Bartholomews. There were considerable limitations of knowledge of anatomy and physiology and infant mortality was rife. But this was an age of much developed humane treatment of the sick, even if the notorious “body-snatchers” ran a lucrative trade.

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