Preface

Summary

“Charitable knowledge,” I have been told, is a rather peculiar conjunction of words. People are benevolent, generous, lenient, merciful, or philanthropic, giving of their time, compassion, or money; knowledge – well, knowledge, qua knowledge, is not. Yet “charitable knowledge” captures the major arguments in this book. Practitioners in eighteenth-century London hospitals used their medical knowledge and skills for charitable ends. They spent hours voluntarily attending to the sick poor. They tried to help ill men and women to get better, whether or not they were particularly successful with their cures or especially kind to the poor folk under their care. During the eighteenth century, hospital physicians and surgeons made teaching pupils on the wards integral to hospitals' charitable duties. In order to do that, they had to make the daily presence of large numbers of pupils on the wards fit into the meaning of charity for the lay governors whose time and money supported the hospitals. Using hospital patients as teaching objects had to become a good thing to do, a valuable contribution to social betterment for all people, not just a useful experience for a very small number of apprentices and personal assistants.

The modern teaching hospital exists because we – as a culture if not as individuals – in a fundamental sense value the moments when an experienced clinician instructs a medical student using the body and responses of a hospital patient.