Community…..Medical and Health

In the past, if a doctor was needed they had to be called from Royston or Baldock. A doctor’s practice was established at Ashwell in 1820, which served Steeple Morden, as the Ashwell General Practice still does today. Royston had a cottage hospital from 1870, which offered limited care or a place to die. Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge was opened in 1766, Hitchin Infirmary in 1840 and The Lister, Stevenage in 1972. Transport was difficult in the past and medical care costly, prior to the advent of the Welfare State.

Nursing in its various manifestations was more embedded in local communities. There would be a local midwife or two, who would supervise births. Monthly nurses were often found and they looked after mother and child around birth and the first few weeks of life. Their role could become blurred with that of  the midwife, although they were considered a distinct sub-set of nursing. Better off families might look for longer term assistance with babies and young children, perhaps justifying the title of nursery nurse. There were also wet nurses, who were women who breast fed babies, when the mother was unable to. Sometimes it was because they were pregnant again and had dried up. Then, there were women, generally older, who would sit with and care for the sick and dying. The best appear to have displayed impressive caring skills. One such nurse was the inspiration for the district nurse scheme. Finally, there would also be the local laying-out woman or women who prepared bodies for mourning and burial. In one Cambridgeshire village the laying-out woman claimed that a tricky part was getting the eyes to stay closed. She said that a “half-crown” was just the right weight, one on each eye, for a while, until they had settled closed.

These women across the various disciplines would not have had formal training and would have learnt on the job. They generally took pride in their varied work, which was carried out skilfully and diligently, within the knowledge and science then available. Caring was embedded in communities and this model offered ready support for the new local cottage hospitals founded from 1859 onwards; Royston opened in 1870. The new hospitals offered a welcome alternative to the workhouse, which for many had been the only hospital available, providing basic accommodation and limited care and treatment.

Coincidentally, the concept of district nurses was also born in 1859. in Liverpool and as it spread nationally, took nursing in the community to a new level. The following year formal training for nurses was introduced, with the first medically trained nurses appearing in the 1860s, after Florence Nightingale established an early nursing and midwifery training school at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. The British Nurses Association was created in 1887 to register trained nurses.

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