Ancoats Hospital

Ancoats Hospital was the commonly used name for the large inner-city hospital, located in Ancoats, to the north of the city centre of Manchester, England. Its official name was Ancoats Hospital and Ardwick and Ancoats Dispensary from 1875, when it replaced the Ardwick and Ancoats Dispensary that had existed since 1828.

The population of Ancoats had risen from almost nothing in the 1790s, when it was an outlying area of Manchester, to around 32,000 by the 1830s, driven by the process of industrialisation that caused Manchester to be described by many as the world's "first industrial city". By the 1830s, the population in the Ancoats area principally comprised Irish labourers and textile workers; the area was heavily industrialised and one of the most densely populated suburbs of the city, being "a mass of mean streets and courtyards zig-zagged amongst factories and canals." Average life expectancy in Manchester as a whole was low, with that of a labourer in 1842 being 17 years.

The origins of English charitable movements for the operation of dispensaries and other types of establishment for treatment of illness, such as hospitals, lying-in facilities and lunatic asylums, can be traced to the Georgian era. The first dispensary had been established in London by John Lettsom in 1770. These charitable endeavours were referred to as "voluntary hospitals" and, according to medical historian Roy Porter, "... signal[led] a new recognition on the part of influential elites that the people's health mattered." The specific purpose of dispensaries was to advise and treat poor people at their homes or as outpatients, relieving some of the burden on hospital facilities and minimising the possibility of epidemics that could arise if people with infectious diseases were admitted to hospitals as inpatients. Those who attended patients under the aegis of such organisations generally did so at no charge, although they might gain social prestige and clients as a result of their actions. Similarly, those who donated or subscribed to the institutions generally gained access to networking opportunities, as well as a voice in the management of the charity and the right to refer patients to it. The opportunity to police morals was thus present: the worthy-but-poor sick might be favoured with Dispensary care but the unworthy were condemned to the ravages of the workhouse; Kevin Siena notes, for example, that "This link between morality and charitable worthiness spelled bad news for syphilitics."

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