The Missing Link Between Hospitals & Asylums During The 1800's.

"I was born in a workhouse. Exploring hospitals which were once workhouses or asylums, unaware to the public mostly. Looking at my own life and asking questions to the older generations of the family. Explore with me how the workhouse has been repurposed into many other things. This generally applying to the UK - If you were born in a hospital, the chances are high it was once a workhouse."

In Britain and Ireland, a workhouse ("poor-house") was allegedly an institution where those unable to support themselves financially were offered accommodation and employment. They were actually a cover for asylums and prisons. In Scotland, they were usually known as poorhouses. The earliest known use of the term workhouse is from 1631, in an account by the mayor of Abingdon reporting that "we have erected wthn our borough a workhouse to set poorer people to work". They were anything but.

The origins of the workhouse can be traced to the Statute of Cambridge 1388, which attempted to address the labor shortages following the Black Death in England by restricting the movement of laborers, and ultimately led to the state becoming responsible for the support of the poor. However, mass unemployment following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the introduction of new technology to replace agricultural workers in particular, and a series of bad harvests, meant that by the early 1830s the established system of poor relief was proving to be unsustainable.

The New Poor Law of 1834 attempted to reverse the economic trend by discouraging the provision of relief to anyone who refused to enter a workhouse. Some Poor Law authorities hoped to run workhouses at a profit by utilizing the free labor of their inmates. Most were employed on tasks such as breaking stones, crushing bonesto produce fertilizer, or picking oakum using a large metal nail known as a spike.

In the mid-1800's, the role of the workhouse was to remove 'undesirables' from society. In the United States, we have a record of 100's of asylums springing up overnight all over the country and at the same time, multitudes of orphans were picked up and put on trains for the midwest (to farm). So, call it what you want. That's what it was.

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