Book Review-‘Greenwich and its Lost Hospitals: Havens of maritime welfare’ by G. C. Cook

Abstract

Professor Cook is a distinguished physician with international experience. Since 2002, he has served as honorary archivist to the Seamen’s Hospital Society (SHS), and it is in this appointment that the genesis of this book lies. The SHS was a charitable institution founded in 1821 to provide medical services to seamen. It operated from three successive hospital ships moored off Greenwich until 1870 when it moved on land as the Dreadnought Hospital. From 1929 until 1939, the SHS produced a Quarterly Magazine containing articles of maritime, medical and local interest. The purpose of this book is to reprint some 120 of these before they are, in Cook’s words ‘relegated to oblivion’. Thus, it comprises a miscellany of articles written 90 years ago about Greenwich, London River and the SHS. They occupy some 95 per cent of the book and, apart from brief written links and a paragraph describing the transition of the Royal Naval College to the University of Greenwich in the 1990s, they are left to stand on their own with little, or no, editorial comment…

Join Today To Read The Full Article

Filed under: Other (Twentieth C) | Other (Nineteenth C)
Subjects include: Administration