About the database

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. It also contains information from the surviving Registers for the hospital’s Highgate-based convalescent home, Cromwell House, which cover the period 1869 to 1904. All the Registers have been carefully transcribed and indexed to allow flexible and accurate searching of this important tool. Users can search for children by name (first and last names), age, sex, address, and institution admitted to. Other searchable fields include date of admission, admitting doctor, outcome of treatment and subsequent referrals (if any).

Several fields have been added to the database for purposes of clarity.

• Length of stay has been calculated from admission and discharge dates.
• Year of birth has been added to help family historians.
• Street names in London have been standardised and assigned to Registration Districts and Registration Sub-districts, with the needs of local historians and demographers in mind.
• A Related Record Field ensures the records for children who moved between the two institutions can be viewed, enabling the full details their stay at the hospital to be easily found. This field is not searchable, but used to display links to related records at the end of the full record display.

A major standardisation effort was applied to diseases. There was little attempt in Victorian and Edwardian times to standardise disease names, nor was there a well developed and universally accepted classification of diseases. In order to help users find their way through the maze of abbreviations, synonyms and misspellings which characterise the diagnosis information in the Registers, three indexes were used, two of which were developed specifically for this project. More details on these indexes can be found in Disease Help.

The database is supplemented by a collection of scanned images from 14 volumes of patient case notes of the founding physician, Dr. Charles West. The case notes, which cover a period between 1852 and 1874, contain a wealth of information on the treatment and management of sick children in the mid-Victorian period. They are linked to the relevant admission records and accessed either from the Results List of a search, or by viewing the full admission record.

Small and Special database can be used in many ways. It can be used to investigate academic questions such as:

• the growing importance of hospitalisation in understanding the health of the urban child
• working class families’ use of the children’s hospital as a resource
• the suspected change in the role of the hospital, from being a place of refuge from dire domestic circumstance, to a place of scientific advancement offering increasing likelihood of cure for children whose life chances had been disadvantaged by poverty.

For family historians, it offers another resource for tracing ancestors.

The database will complement, and inform, other archival databases, and will fill a gap in information on the lives of Victorian urban children, and on the institutionalisation – and medicalisation – of childhood, that was such a feature of nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain.

Help