With industrialisation making living conditions worse in the cities, the improvements to hospital provision, surgery and the care of the poor needed to gain apace. Emma Slattery Williams explores how healthcare in 18th-century Britain changed, and the pioneering preventative treatments that helped combat a killer disease.
When Sir Michael Palin was recovering from open heart surgery at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in central London he marvelled at the William Hogarth murals above th
“Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past.” Machiavelli Cancer has been primarily a major disease of the latter half of the 20th century and onwards.