The Negotiation of Inclusion and Exclusion in the Westminster Infirmary 1716-1750

The Westminster Infirmary, established in 1719 to offer medical charity to London’s sick poor, was the world’s first voluntary hospital. This chapter examines how different debates about inclusion and exclusion shaped ideas about the hospital’s social and religious mission, its policies and processes regarding donors, staff, and patients, and patient admission and discharge. It shows how open the Westminster Infirmary’s activities were to negotiation by its stakeholders between 1719 and 1750, but how over time new policies were introduced in an attempt to curb unruly behaviour which limited scope for the negotiation of the rules and created an increasingly bureaucratic and exclusionary culture within the hospital.