Hospitals and healthcare
The two main hospitals were Fryern Hospital, initially an isolation hospital for Eastleigh and Bishopstoke, and The Sanatorium, which later was built as a workhouse in 1900, and later became Leigh House, a hospital for young people with mental health difficulties.
There are Eastleigh and District Local History Society Publications on both of these, but do post your memories too.
There are Eastleigh and District Local History Society Publications on both of these, but do post your memories too.
posted by Chris | 1:00 PM
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See extract below for some examples of herbalism and other remedies used in the 19th century in the neighbourhood of Chandler's Ford
Otterbourne Baker, School Master and Medicine Man
Extracts from An Old Woman’s Outlook in a Hampshire Village (1892) by Charlotte Yonge
Long ago, in that still pretty, well-gardened cottage (lived) a baker. He made excellent bread, besides certain fair-complexioned plain buns, which swelled to a huge size in a cup of tea, and had a fame of their own in the neighbouring town. His was genuine 'home-made' bread, made with real yeast of beer. Ordinary baker's bread had, he said, a 'vinosity taste.'
He was also a real oldfashioned herbalist, and had one or two curious old books. He compounded drugs and gave his attendance and his medicines freely out of pure charity. It was really valuable doctoring in many simple cases. (Union doctors were not. Parishes were supposed to be attended by busy surgeons, but this came to nothing. The lady in each parish had to be doctor, and make the best of the remarkable complaints she heard of. I remember a great white jug, where 'Jesuits' bark' was soaked before quinine in powder was cheaply attainable for the ague, which was then common in the parish. For ague one prescription in the next village was, among many others, to have a bandage round the wrists, lined with gunpowder and set on fire. Or to be led to the top of a mound, and violently pushed down! As a remedy for fits, to wear a ring of beaten sixpences given by six young women who had married with out changing their surname; or to wear suspended from the neck 'a hair from the cross on the back of a he-donkey.' Moreover, a gentleman's butler, feeling a lump or rising in his throat, swallowed shot to 'keep down his lights'; and 'chaney'—crushed porcelain—was a favourite remedy.) But our little baker's was real herbalist treatment with simples, and, as far as we knew, not empiric.
The good man united the offices of clerk and schoolmaster. He could read, write, and cypher better than most men in the parish; and he was deeply in earnest. I believe there was no complaint of his discipline, though it was peculiar, and a row of naughty boys were set down to kneel at a bench with books before them, and hands tied behind.
Alas! It was an excitable brain, and over-tasked. He had two sisters who lived with him, both partially insane though harmless; but he was often up half the night with one or other of them. Each, too, had a son (perhaps one was a stepson), and one of these was to assist in the business, but was pronounced 'Never to get beyond the A B C book of baking.' The other was a cobbler, but both preyed upon him; his affairs became entangled, and things grew worse and worse. The village shopkeeper, the maker of the 'vinosity' bread, actually came in private to beg the clergyman to convey secretly from hini means for the household.
While the authorities were considering what could be done for the dear little man, came the first note of school inspection, very mild and entirely religious, by Archdeacon Allen. But the very idea was fatal. The good man told the curate that he could not stand it; and knowing the distress he was in, he was assured that his school should not be examined; but the very notion, coming on all the rest, developed the latent insanity. He was missed, and finally found in the river, to the lasting grief of those who had always loved and honoured him, through all his quaintness.
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