of a social historian
In my historical research and writing, I keep coming back to the Lady Almoner. From the 1890s, hospitals appointed almoners to weed out middle-class ‘abuse’ of the pre-NHS charitable system. The role evolved to include assessing and collecting payments from patients who could afford it before giving way to medical social work as we would recognise it today.
The blog posts below address the history of the almoner and the social work profession more broadly…
My latest contributions for the People’s History of the NHS website are a blog post and a longer accompanying entry for our growing Encyclopaedia, both looking at the impact of the introduction of the British National Health Service on medical social work. World Social Work Day (Tuesday 15 March in 2016) is a good time to look back to the …
The latest issue of the Voluntary Sector Review has now been published. It features my review of Brent Ruswick's Almost Worthy: The Poor, Paupers, and the Science of Charity in America, 1877-1917. I won't repeat the review here, but I will offer a few brief thoughts about the book and the series in which it's published, as well as the …
Tomorrow is World Social Work Day, so it's a fitting time to think about the history of social work. This is a field I've been interested in for a while - and to which I hope to return in the near future. In 2012 Professor John Stewart and I co-organised a workshop at Glasgow Caledonian …
Musings 