Children's Convalescent Home, 1845-1970
type: CreativeWork
description: From the middle of the nineteenth century a new type of health care institution, the children's convalescent home, began to provide care to sick children. Institutional convalescence quickly became an established part of medical orthodoxy, particularly for urban working-class children. Convalescent homes combined simple medical care with the natural therapies of diet, rest, and fresh air within a home-like environment. But they were also institutions of their time. They catered for medical conditions and socials needs that no longer exist today. Moreover, they were culturally acceptable in a way that is no longer recognisable. Their position within a particular epoch makes them revealing about health care provision during that time, and has broader historical significance for how we understand periods of significant social and cultural change; pointing towards points in time when ideas of children's emotional, physical, and health care needs diverged or changed. Despite their potential richness as a source, children's convalescent homes have gone largely unstudied. Historical research on developments in children's health care has focussed on the provision of child welfare clinics, domiciliary nurse visits, and school medical inspections. Numerous scholars have argued that it was primarily through welfare clinics that professional medicine came to ‘know’ children, and conversely, through clinic visits that mothers were exposed to new methods of scientific child care, as their children were weighed, measured, and monitored. Since Roy Porter's call to study history from below, historians have turned to new methods of analysis to study the subjective experiences of the non-hegemonic classes and subaltern groups. In doing so they have produced studies that have illuminated the experiences of diverse patient populations. However, the voices of child-patients have remained persistently silent, and the bodies of literature that study children's health care and children's su…
abstract: From the middle of the nineteenth century a new type of health care institution, the children's convalescent home, began to provide care to sick children. Institutional convalescence quickly became an established part of medical orthodoxy, particularly for urban working-class children. Convalescent homes combined simple medical care with the natural therapies of diet, rest, and fresh air within a home-like environment. But they were also institutions of their time. They catered for medical conditions and socials needs that no longer exist today. Moreover, they were culturally acceptable in a way that is no longer recognisable. Their position within a particular epoch makes them revealing about health care provision during that time, and has broader historical significance for how we understand periods of significant social and cultural change; pointing towards points in time when ideas of children's emotional, physical, and health care needs diverged or changed. Despite their potential richness as a source, children's convalescent homes have gone largely unstudied. Historical research on developments in children's health care has focussed on the provision of child welfare clinics, domiciliary nurse visits, and school medical inspections. Numerous scholars have argued that it was primarily through welfare clinics that professional medicine came to ‘know’ children, and conversely, through clinic visits that mothers were exposed to new methods of scientific child care, as their children were weighed, measured, and monitored. Since Roy Porter's call to study history from below, historians have turned to new methods of analysis to study the subjective experiences of the non-hegemonic classes and subaltern groups. In doing so they have produced studies that have illuminated the experiences of diverse patient populations. However, the voices of child-patients have remained persistently silent, and the bodies of literature that study children's health care and children's su…
author: Marven, Maria
language: en
keywords: convalescent, oral history, listening guide, children
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/2f7d304a-0049-47e8-9c1f-3e7b1f53fdf8/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2019-11-30
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:18Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.45977