About the Databases

At the heart of the HHARP website lies a suite of unique databases, based on the admission registers to three children’s hospitals: Great Ormond Street Hospital (and its convalescent home, Cromwell House), the Evelina Hospital and the Alexandra Hospital for Children with Hip Disease. Later in 2010, a fourth hospital, Glasgow Sick Children’s Hospital at Yorkhill, will be added to this collection. The Admission Registers cover a period ranging from February 1852 (when Great Ormond Street’s doors first opened) through to December 31^st 1914. While the Great Ormond Street records are continuous for the whole period, the other hospital records cover shorter runs within these dates: Cromwell House, 1869 to 1910; the Evelina, 1874 -1877/1889-1902; Alexandra Hospital for Hip Disease, 1867-1895. The Yorkhill database, when completed, will cover 1883 to 1904.

The Registers have been carefully transcribed and indexed to enable flexible and accurate searching of this important resource. Users can search either across all databases or by individual institution on a range of data types including: name (first and last), age, sex, and address, disease and outcome. Other searchable fields include date of admission and discharge, admitting doctor, outcome of treatment and subsequent referrals (if any).

Several data elements have been added to the databases, by the project team, to make searching simpler or to enable standard searches to be conducted across databases.

Length of stay has been calculated from admission and discharge dates.
Year of birth has been added to help family historians.
For addresses in London, street names have been standardised and assigned to Registration Districts and Registration Sub-districts, with the needs of local historians and demographers in mind. Later in 2010 the address information will be further enhanced by adding county to records relating to patients from outside London. The Glasgow database will also have registration district and county information included on its launch later in 2010.
Disease standardisation and classification has enabled cross database searching for diseases. The work on diseases was a challenging but vital element of the project. 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 all the Registers, three indexes have been added. Two of which were developed specifically for this project and more details on these indexes can be found in Disease Help. The third, the World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD10) was added for use by modern medical demographers.

The Great Ormond Street 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.

It is hoped that the HHARP databases will be used in many ways, and that the addition of three more hospitals in London and Glasgow will add to its utility by providing opportunities for comparison. Academic questions it may illuminate include:

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.
differences and similarities between different regions of London and between the English and Scottish capitals.

The addition of the Alexandra Hospital for Children with Hip Disease will provide a unique opportunity to study the treatment of children suffering from the scourge of poor children in the 19^th century, tubercular disease of the bones.

For family historians HHARP offers another resource for tracing ancestors, in the inter-census years.

The HHARP databases 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.