The life histories of nineteenth-century Swedish hospital patients challenge the
notion that hospitals were mainly occupied with the "industrious poor," and gives some support
to the idea that hospitals were "death-traps." The latter idea is reviewed through an examination
of the treatment of various diseases and of the life expectancies after dismissal in comparison with
the life expectancies of people who never had to enter a hospital. The study underlines the
imporiance of looking closely at the diseases patients suffered when we undertake to evaluate the
role of nineteenth-century hospitals.
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