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Social History of Medicine 1990 3(1):61-88; doi:10.1093/shm/3.1.61
© 1990 by Society for the Social History of Medicine
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‘Dear Old Mother Levy's’: The Jewish Maternity Home and Sick Room Helps Society 1895–1939

LARA MARKS*

*Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine 45–47 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6PE

SUMMARY Historians have tended to neglect the issue of ethnicity and religion in the provision of health-care in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This question particularly needs to be addressed given the dominant role played by religious institutions in the provision of district and hospital nursing care in this period. Tracing the foundation of the Sick Room Helps Society and later the Jewish Maternity Home, this paper shows how religion and ethnicity played a vital role in shaping the form of health-care afforded to Jewish mothers in East London. These issues were critically important at a time when comprehensive medical care and maternity services were minimal and not provided along secular lines. Living in a predominantly Protestant society Jewish patients had specific requirements which were not always catered for by the outside community. This paper examines the experience Jewish mothers had with East London maternity services and how their special needs spurred the Jewish community to establish an innovative form of aid for mothers through its home-helps scheme. Evidence strongly suggests that the Jewish poor had much lower rates of infant mortality than their neighbours. One contributory factor to this low rate of infant mortality could have been the access Jewish mothers and their infants had to Jewish communal support.

Keywords: Jewish; East London; maternity care; home-helps; health; welfare; self-help; community; charity; Poor Law


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