Children’s Hospitals

Children’s hospitals and care of sick children took many different forms and changed over time. Geographical conditions, political policies, religions, economic development, and demographic patterns all contributed to the picture. For example, in Europe 19th-century England, heavily industrialized with a growing urban population, contrasted with a small nation such as Sweden that was still largely agrarian, an elongated area on the Scandinavian Peninsula where much of the northern part of the country at the end of the 1800s had a population density of two persons per kilometer. This entry sketches some of the guises the care of children took with examples drawn from the British and Swedish contexts.