Georgian workhouses served many functions. Although they were nominally devoted to work, they routinely provided care and education for children and refuge for single mothers, as social historians know well. They sheltered, fed, and nursed the elderly, disabled, and mad and acted as de facto employment agents, placing young people in apprenticeships and jobs. They also provided considerable medical care. Medical historians have been slow to explore workhouses, even though simply itemizing their medical services impresses; a partial list includes obstetrical care, surgery, outpatient care, emergency medicine, doctor training, and even trials of experimental drugs and procedures. Workhouses need to be integrated into the history of eighteenth-century institutional medicine, which, for the most part, has remained a history of hospitals.

However, workhouse infirmaries were not just smaller versions of existing institutions, hospitals in miniature. This chapter seeks to show how workhouse infirmaries became unique medical spaces, where particular forms of care for particular kinds of patients occurred. Workhouses' special obligations determined that, in practice, they evolved into institutions quite unlike those around them. While this chapter cannot comprehensively analyze all forms of care in workhouses, two related themes allow one to cast workhouse medicine in wide relief: contagion and exclusion. While no parish can be considered typical of so varied a city as London, the documentation related to the workhouse in St.