Nicholas Orme

The first English hospitals appeared soon after the Norman Conquest. By the year 1300 they numbered over 500, caring for the sick at every level of society—from the gentry and clergy to pilgrims, travelers, beggars, and lepers. Excluded from towns but placed by main highways where they could gather alms, they had a complex relation with medieval society: cherished yet marginalized, self-contained yet also parasitic.This book—the first general history of medieval and Tudor hospitals in eighty-five years—traces when and why they originated and follows their development through the crisis periods of the Black Death and the English Reformation when many disappeared. Nicholas Orme and Margaret Webster explore the hospitals' religious, charitable, and medical functions, examine their buildings, staffing, and finances, and analyze their patients in terms of social background and medical needs. They reconstruct the daily life of hospitals, from worship to living conditions, food, and care. The general survey is complemented by a regional study of hospitals of the southwest of England, including detailed histories of all the recorded institutions in Cornwall and Devon.

In 1857 Everard Digby, an extrovert Cambridge scholar, published the first scientific treatise on swimming – and one of the first on any modern sport. Six months later he was expelled from his college, and dies in obscurity as a country parson. Nicholas Orme rehabilitates Digby as a great pioneer of the history of sport. The book opens with a detailed history of swimming in Britain from the Romans to the sixteenth century, which is followed by an account of Digby’s life and work and its impact on swimming down to the eighteenth century. The book also includes the first modern edition of Digby’s treatise, in the English version of 1595, with the 43 original illustrations.