To Lie on the Table

The Matron's Linen and the Arrival of Hospital Hygiene in a Provincial Cottage Hospital, 1871–1912

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities reads the linen committee minutes of a twenty-two-bed provincial cottage hospital, 1871–1912, against the weekly laundry book its matron kept. Of 412 requests the matron put to the committee, 176 were ordered to lie on the table, and the practices they described appear in the laundry book within a year in 117 of the 158 cases the book can test, so that the hospital's linen had been boiled to a timetable for nineteen years before its annual report announced the adoption of aseptic methods.

@misc{slop_j12we1,
  author       = {Ylva Onyekwere},
  title        = {To Lie on the Table: The Matron's Linen and the Arrival of Hospital Hygiene in a Provincial Cottage Hospital, 1871–1912},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.j12we1},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-matron-s-linen-j12we1/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}