Hospital type Maternity Founded 1749, moved 1849 | Beds 20, later 40 Closed 1913 | |
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Location Brownlow Street and later Endell Street, Holborn, London, England, United Kingdom Emergency department No Accident & Emergency | ||
The British Lying-In Hospital was a maternity hospital established in London 1749, the second such foundation in the capital.
History
The impetus for the creation of a dedicated lying-in hospital was dissatisfaction on the part of the governers of the Middlesex Hospital with maternity facilities in that hospital. A new hospital with 20 beds was established in 1749 in Brownlow Street, Long Acre, Holborn, under the presidency of the 2nd Duke of Portland, and initially called the Lying-In Hospital for Married Women. Consequent on the establishment of the 1750 City of London Lying-In Hospital, and the 1752 General Lying-In Hospital (later renamed the Queen Charlotte's Hospital), the Holborn hospital changed its name to the British Lying-In Hospital. It moved to a new purpose-built building with 40 beds in Endell Street, in 1849.
The hospital was funded by voluntary subsciptions and donations. At the outset, the hospital provided only for in-patients, but by 1828 extended to an out-patient service, supervising home deliveries. In the 1870s, it was treating about 750 in-patients per annum.
The creation of the hospital was not without controversy at the time, and the nature, characteristics and effects of the British in particular, and maternity hospitals in general, continue to be a subject of study. Prior to the hospital's creation, childbirth was for the most-part a domestic affair relaying on the good offices of largely untrained (if well-experienced) midwives; only the upper echelons of society tended to be served by male physicians. The British Lying-In Hospital offered - to married women only - a largely female-only space removed from the home in which childbirth was supervised almost exclusively by female midwives under the supervision of female matrons. The intervention of male physicians was a rare event.
The hospital was attacked within the first two years of operation by Frank Nicholls, a prominent physician who issued, anonymously, a satirical essay, the Petition of the Unborn Babes, which raised a number of concerns questioning the involvement of (allegedly brutal) men-midwives, and asserting high mother and baby mortality rates. Nicholls publication can be seen to set the tone for much of the subsequent discussion of maternity hospitals to this day. Nicholls' received a response with the publication of A Vindication of Man Midwifery, 1752, but the debate about Man Midwifery and the use of forceps raged for at least the next century.
The gender separation of roles at the British was called into question from 1862 when the then physician-in-residence, James Edmunds, established with other the Female Medical Society, and in 1864 when a Ladies' Medical College was established to train women in midwifery and obstetrics. From 1867, the college's students were able to get clinical experience at the British - albeit the nature of Edmunds' innovation led to disputes amongst the governing board and unsuccessful effort to unseat him.
A note in Old and New London: Volume 3 states that the hospital had by 1874 treated 47,000 in-patients. The British Lying-In Hospital continued through to 1913, and was by 1915 merged with the Woolwich Home for Mothers and Babies to create the British Hospital for Mothers and Babies. The National Archives hold records of births and baptisms at the hospital in the period 1749-1868, and the London Metropolitan Archives holds a wealth of organisational records.