Great Ormond Street Hospital
Historic Patient Database Project
A major part of the Centre's work over the last six years has focused on the Great Ormond Street Hospital Project. The overall aim of the project has been to create a searchable database from the admission registers of the children who were admitted to the first hospital for sick children in the country from its opening in 1852 until 1914. Now complete, the database contains details on about 86,000 patients and represents a unique and valuable resource for epidemiologists, academic researchers and family historians. In addition, digitised versions of Charles West's case notes have been linked to the main database in order to provide detailed case studies of the illnesses of a number of named children; whilst a second database of the children who entered Great Ormond Street's convalescent home at Cromwell House has also been created. The morbidity of children has been a neglected area of research and this project offers an unrivalled opportunity to study the health of children over a lengthy period of time.
For example, users will be able to search for individual children by name, age and address. Medical historians and epidemiologists will be able to search by disease and outcome of treatment, looking for patterns in incidence, such as differences between the sexes, age profiles of particular disease sufferers, and they will be able to analyse data by civil registration district in the analysis of disease incidence and communication. For the family historian, this new database could be a very important source. It may be possible to pick up children missing from census returns. The supporters who sponsored the patient's admission may also reveal hitherto unknown social or work relationships. Additionally, the database reveals that whole families used the hospital and it was not uncommon, when one child from a family was admitted, for brothers and sisters to follow sometime later.
The case notes compiled by Charles West are also of great potential value to medical and family historians. Although their content varies, they can provide, for example, the previous medical history of the patient (and of his or her siblings and parents), the occupation of the parents, details of vaccination, earlier medical treatment and stays in hospital, the height and weight of the child, the response to treatment and a daily account of medication and nourishment. Value judgements concerning a child's family circumstances are also recorded with 'undernourished', 'neglected' and 'the family lives in very poor circumstances' being common comments.
From these examples, it is clear that the material contained in the admission registers' database and the digitised case notes will be of considerable potential value to historians with a variety of research agendas.
Research aims
- to make visible the most disadvantaged of London's poor - its sick children - in a way hitherto unattempted;
- to provide the starting point for studies of childhood morbidity (as opposed to mortality) at a time of unparalleled urban growth and public health concern;
- to chart the growing understanding of children's diseases, and the development of techniques and treatment regimes in response to the medical professionals' experience of the hospitalised child;
- to investigate the constituencies of child health; the children themselves, their parents, the doctors and the supporters of what was probably the first in-patient facility for children in the English-speaking world.
