Small and Special is a collection of resources relating to the early years of The Hospital for Sick Children at Great Ormond Street, England’s first in-patient children’s hospital. Here you can trace a patient, learn about childhood diseases, or investigate a member of the medical staff.
The Admission Registers of the Hospital for Sick Children at Great Ormond Street, from its opening in February 1852 until December 31st 1914, form the core of the project, and will be complemented at a later date by Registers of Cromwell House, the hospital’s convalescent home, from 1869 until December 1910. The Hospital Registers are of uniform format. Each entry gives the child’s name, age (in years and months), sex, and address. Further columns give diagnosis, which can include as many as four separate conditions, date of admission into the hospital and date of attack. The date of discharge is recorded, along with the result of treatment, which is given as ‘Recovered’, ‘Relieved’, ‘Not Relieved’ or ‘Died’. A column for remarks gives such details as operations performed, drugs issued, brief post-mortem results or an explanation for a premature discharge of the child from the hospital. The final column gives the name of the hospital governor or medical officer who sponsored the patient. In later versions, the Registers also included the name of the admitting doctor and the ward the child was initially admitted to.
A unique database lies at the heart of the Small and Special website. It is based on the information contained in the In-Patient Admission Registers from Great Ormond Street Hospital for the period 1852 to 1914, which have survived intact. The Registers have been carefully transcribed and indexed to allow flexible and accurate searching of this important resource. Users can search for children by name (first and last names), age, sex, and address. Other searchable fields include date of admission and discharge, admitting doctor, outcome of treatment and subsequent referrals (if any). These fields reflect information held in the Registers.
The Small and Special website has been developed, with funds provided by The Friends of the Children of Great Ormond Street, to make the database available to as wide an audience as possible, regardless of location or field of interest. Access is unrestricted and is completely free to use. Some restrictions have been applied to the volume of data which can be viewed at any one time, to protect the database from unscrupulous users.
Small and Special also contains a library of articles on subjects connected to the Hospital and the period, including a history of the Hospital for Sick Children at Great Ormond Street, pen-portraits of some of the medical officers, nurses and patients, and articles on the buildings which made up the Victorian and Edwardian institution. Most of the articles have been written by historian, Dr Andrea Tanner, the architect of the Project. The remainder have been contributed by archivist Nicholas Baldwin, and others involved in the Project. The articles are complemented by a collection of images of the Hospital from the period.
Vist the site at http://www.smallandspecial.org/
