English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Zendy Plus

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Zendy Tools

Zendy Open

In September 1833 the medical officers of the Aldersgate-Street Dispensary, theoldest charitable institution of its kind in London, collectively resigned theirposts in protest at a change in election procedures. This event elicited awidespread and vociferous reaction from medical practitioners throughout theBritish Isles as meetings were held and resolutions passed in support of theactions of the Dispensary's medical staff. This article seeks to make sense ofthis incident and the furore it generated, proposing that it reveals afundamental transformation in the cultures of early nineteenth-century medicineand epitomises the newly imagined relationships between knowledge and socialauthority which were characteristic of the ‘Age of Reform’. It suggests thatduring the early nineteenth century, a large number of medical reformers, manyof them followers and readers of Thomas Wakley's radical journal,  TheLancet , began to question the imperatives of gratuitous, charitablemedical service. Where once the values of charity and benevolence had beencentral to the social performance of medical identity, early nineteenth-centurymedical radicals were increasingly figuring charity as an ignoble affront to asocial authority based on knowledge and expertise rather than wealth orconnections. In addition, this article also considers how the Aldersgateincident served to galvanise the semantic and conceptual existence of themedical ‘profession’. Drawing upon the work of Benedict Anderson it demonstrateshow medical societies and medical journals, especially  TheLancet , encouraged medical practitioners to think of themselves asconstituent members of a spatially extensive ‘imagined community’.

Medicine, Reform and the ‘End’ of Charity in Early Nineteenth-Century England*