[1] "If the pauper is always promptly attended by a skilful and well qualified medical practitioner ... if the patient be furnished with all the cordials and stimulants which may promote his recovery: it cannot be denied that his condition in these respects is better than that of the needy and industrious ratepayer who has neither the money nor the influence to secure prompt and careful attendance.
Standards of care were increasingly criticised: "…I have visited many prisons and lunatic asylums, not only in England, but in France, and Germany.
A single English workhouse contains more that justly calls for condemnation than is found in the very worst prisons or public lunatic asylums that I have seen.
In France, the medical patients of our workhouses would be found in ‘hopitaux’; the infirm aged poor would be in ‘hospices’; and the blind, the idiot, the lunatic, the bastard child and the vagrant would similarly be placed in an appropriate but separate establishment.
It is at once shocking to every principle of reason and every feeling of humanity that all these varied forms of wretchedness should thus be crowded together into one common abode; that no attempt should be made by law.
The 1867 report to Gathorne Hardy by Uvedale Corbett and Dr. W. O. Markham, after the scandal around the death of Timothy Daly, a resident of Holborn Workhouse Infirmary, recommended that: "The infirmary should be separated from the rest of the workhouse and under independent management, and that the treatment of sick paupers should be carried out under different principles from those to which the able-bodied were subject."
An inspector observed that the Southwark workhouse "does not meet the requirements of medical science, nor am I able to suggest any arrangements which would in the least enable it to do so".
By the middle of the 19th century there was a growing realisation that the purpose of the workhouse was no longer solely or even chiefly to act as a deterrent to the able-bodied poor, and the first generation of buildings was widely considered to be inadequate.
[8][9] The Royal Commission of 1905 reported that workhouses were unsuited to deal with the different categories of resident they had traditionally housed, and recommended that specialised institutions for each class of pauper should be established, in which they could be treated appropriately by properly trained staff.
Camberwell workhouse (in Peckham, South London) continued until 1985 as a shelter for more than 1000 homeless men, operated by the Department of Health and Social Security and renamed a resettlement centre.