The Hospitals and Population Growth: Part 1 The Voluntary General Hospitals, Mortality and Local Populations in the English Provinces in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.

As a contribution to the debate on the influence of hospitals on mortality rates during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this article suggests that the hospitals' role may have been underestimated. Part 1 begins with a consideration of the hospitals debate and the source materials available for a series of case studies of provincial hospitals and their patient catchment areas. Environmental conditions and demographic changes in seven provincial towns are examined focusing particularly upon mortality rates and the causes of death in order to gauge the scope for hospital treatment. Each hospital is then examined in turn, the initial conclusion being that the hospitals' physical layout and internal sanitary arrangements were usually planned with care during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Only later, as population pressure on hospital resources grew, resulting in the overcrowding of wards and a rising proportion of serious or acute cases did conditions tend to deteriorate.