The eighteenth-century lying-in hospital and the unmarried mother

The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw great developments in scientific learning and enquiry, especially following the founding of the Royal Society in 1660, and, with it, a more questioning approach to matters religious and scientific. Ideas were being disseminated more widely through pamphlets and the growing number of newspapers, due to an increased degree of literacy. Alongside these developments came a growing concern for the poor and needy, resulting in the setting up of voluntary institutions for the care of the sick. Before this time the only hospitals already in existence in England were St Bartholomews and St Thomas' which had both been established before 1700. It was also at this time that many specialist hospitals were founded, among which the 'lying-in hospitals' were some of the first, with most of these only treating the 'respectable' married women. There was a notable, if controversial, exception to this; the hospital that came to be known as the General Lying-in Hospital.

One of the reasons for this area of growth was that the knowledge of obstetrics was being widely disseminated at this time with many of the prominent surgeons and apothecaries of the day going to Paris to learn from the techniques practised at the Hôtel Dieu.1 This was an institution where mothers were invited to be delivered of their babies, and where physicians taught midwifery. Many of these physicians were to become 'man-midwives'. The first hospital in Britain and Ireland to treat maternity patients was the Dublin Lying-Hospital, later known as the Rotunda. It was established in 1745 under the Mastership of its founder Bartholomew Mosse.2 The history of the hospitals established later in London is not so easy to chronicle,...