Cottage hospital

The term community hospital is now applied to most of these buildings where they are used to deliver healthcare, reflecting the wider range of services that are provided in more modern times.

Medicines (termed ‘physics’) were prescribed, and minor surgical procedures as well as cupping and bleeding were carried out, the patient returning to their home after treatment.

The only other possibility for care was in a local workhouse infirmary but this was some 12 kilometres away in Guildford, had no trained nurses and carried the real (at that time) risk of the patient being stigmatized as a pauper.

The third possibility was to stay at home; in those days and for poor people this condition is indicated by Horace Swete, a village surgeon in Wrington in Somerset, UK, in his book of 1870.

[1] To those who visit their poorer neighbours, the sick room of the cottager is a familiar object, the cottage itself generally consisting, at the best, of a kitchen and a back shed, with perhaps two bedrooms, which are often without a fireplace; the windows, small, low and frequently not made to open; the laboring man, who has met with a severe accident, with difficulty is carried up the narrow staircase – generally of the stepladder description – and is placed on a bed utterly unfit for the treatment of a broken limb, and which his restless tossings has disordered.

Perhaps he may possess a coverlid or counterpane; but more generally the top covering of a sick man’s bed is the collection of unused clothes in the house; the floor, generally occupied by some ingeniously-constructed temporary bedding for the wife and younger children; no useful sanitary arrangements to be obtained; the patient parched with thirst, and with the capricious appetite of illness, turns his head away from the badly cooked food; the wife, tired out with bad nights, and "worritted" with the children who are constantly crying; added to which may be the close, sickening steam of ‘washing out a few things’, which some neighbour with well-meant kindness has dropped in to do, keeping up an incessant chatter of village gossip that drives the sick man wild, and here we have a tolerably fair picture of the cottage home in sickness.

"[7]The moneyed class could afford much better conditions and treatment in private hospital without the risk of loss of employment, a slide in poverty or worse.

[1] Albert Napper's sympathy for the poorer classes was shared by the Reverend JH Sapte, Rector of Cranley (as the name was than spelled) and they fostered the idea of finding some accommodation for the care and nursing of the ill poor.

Among the first 100 patients he recorded "compound fracture of both bones in the leg", "extensive cicatrix from a burn", "chronic pneumonia in both lungs", "multiple injuries" and amputation of fingers in a boy".