South London Hospital for Women and Children

The South London Hospital for Women and Children was a general hospital treating women and children on Clapham Common in London, UK. It was also known as the South London Hospital for Women and the South London Women's Hospital. Founded by Eleanor Davies-Colley and Maud Chadburn in 1912, it always employed an all-woman staff. It closed in 1984.

Foundation
Eleanor Davies-Colley and Maud Chadburn, two surgeons at the New Hospital for Women (later the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital), began raising funds in 1911 for a new South London general hospital for women and children, with the aim of employing an all-woman medical staff. The New Hospital (the first hospital to be run along these lines) was increasingly unable to cope with the demand for its services, and many women were being turned away untreated. At that time, such hospitals served the dual purpose of improving medical care for women and enhancing career prospects for female medical practitioners, as many hospitals refused to employ women. Since the foundation of the New Hospital in 1872, the rationale for women-only hospitals had evolved from protecting feminine modesty to providing treatment choices for women, reflecting the growth of feminism during this period.

Aided by Davies-Colley's cousin Harriet Weaver, publisher of The Freewoman, and other feminists, enough money was raised to open an outpatients' department in Newington Causeway in 1912. A caustic letter to The Times from a medical practitioner who declared the project to be unnecessary, as any demand for women to treat women was an artificial result of women forcing themselves into medicine, seems to have sparked the major donation: £53,000 for building plus a £40,000 endowment. With such generous funding, progress was swift: a purpose-built eighty-bed hospital on Clapham Common was opened by Queen Mary on 4 July 1916. Staffed entirely by women, it was the ninth general women's hospital in Britain to be run in this way, and the largest, thanks to the size of its endowment. Weaver became their first Honorary Secretary.

The South London Hospital included not only charity wards where patients paid only what they could afford, but also private rooms for which patients paid a set fee of 1–3 guineas per week. This reflected a trend in the later wave of women's hospitals (founded after the 1890s) towards treating a broader range of women, including the growing middle classes. The terms of the endowment strictly required that the hospital should employ only female doctors and admit only women, with the exception of children under seven. In fact, according to Chadburn's unpublished memoirs, the hospital's first inpatient only just qualified, being a boy of almost seven who had been injured in an accident involving a laundry van (cited by Elston ).

Interwar years and the Second World War
After the First World War, the hospital expanded, with new departments being added for dermatology (1922) and urology (1924). Radium treatment for cancer was performed between 1924 and the opening of the specialist Marie Curie Hospital in Hampstead in 1929. The hospital buildings were enlarged in the 1930s to 1950s. By the 1930s, however, the need for wholly female-staffed hospitals to provide positions for women had reduced greatly, as equality of career opportunities for women in mainstream, mixed-staffed hospitals started to emerge, and the future of such hospitals began to be called into question. Although several women-only hospitals began to admit men during the 1930s, the South London Hospital's fundraising was sufficiently effective to allow it retain its original staffing policy. The terms of its founding donation were so strict that Chadburn claimed an Act of Parliament had been required for male soldiers to be treated during the Second World War (cited by Elston ).

National Health Service and closure
When the National Health Service (NHS) took over hospital provision in 1948, hospital care became free at point of use and remaining restrictions on hospital appointments by gender in mainstream hospitals were formally removed. These changes obviously had an enormous impact on the need both for women-only hospitals and for the provision of charitable care. The South London Hospital, like most other women-only hospitals, was absorbed into the NHS. Although the NHS legislation did include some provision for maintaining the objects of the original institutions, where practical, the new regionally based administration made this problematic. Many women-only hospitals were closed, merged with other mixed hospitals, or required to admit male staff. The South London Hospital escaped these fates for more than three decades. In 1982, 3674 and 1953 new outpatients, respectively, attended the departments of gynaecological and genitourinary medicine.

The South London Hospital was closed in 1984, deemed uneconomic by Wandsworth Health Authority, a claim disputed by three employees in a letter to the British Medical Journal.

The women-only staffing policy was retained until the hospital's closure, when it was one of the very few general hospital in Britain to remain wholly staffed by women. It fostered what three employees described in 1984 as 'that unique liaison and cooperation that is so striking a feature of the hospital.' The all-women wards served by an entirely female nursing and consultant staff also seem to have been popular with the public; a petition protesting against closure was signed by 60,000 people, and the hospital building was occupied for nine months by protesters.

Redevelopment
The original hospital building was by leading architect Sir Edwin Cooper, and has been described as a 'most impressive landmark building and a good example of neo-classical 1920s architecture'. Although some of the building was demolished in 2004, the original building's facade was incorporated into a development including a supermarket and residential apartments, after demolition was contested on grounds of its architectural importance.

External link

 * Ideal Homes: Suburbia in Focus: South London Hospital for Women, Clapham, 1925 (with photograph of the hospital in 1925)