"Globulizing" the hospital ward

The medical world in 19th century England saw vast changes: an increasingly professionalised medical community struggled with the central focus of their careers and influence shifting rapidly towards the new hospitals. Many ‘alternative’ medical practitioners embraced the concept and none did so more than the followers of homoeopathy. As homoeopathic practitioners increasingly came under fire from their opponents, homoeopathic hospitals were founded across the world – with varying degrees of success, a phenomenon often neglected in the existing historiographies, particularly beyond Germany. This study examines two such institutions founded in 19th century London and Madrid, shining a light on their creation and development, their first decades of operation as well as on the men and women who worked, visited and were treated therein. It paints a picture of the founders, supporters, patients and pathologies seen in the wards and how the practitioners saw the effect and success of homoeopathic treatment. The book scrutinizes the wider role of these hospitals beyond clinical care: as training facilities, nodes in national and international networks and ultimately as a buttress in homoeopathy‘s struggle for a solid basis of legitimacy within contemporary clinical medicine.