'Madness', James McArdell, after Robert Edge Pine 1760

Care in the community

02 October 2012

Historians have long recognised that the family were the chief carers of the mentally ill. A new study will investigate the emotional and economic consequences of what care in the community meant to 18th-century families.

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The Blind Beggar and his Grand-daughter

Benefiting from history

24 February 2012

A Cambridge academic’s research into the final days of the Old English Poor Law has thrown up some remarkable parallels to today’s welfare state – and casts new light on the ‘benefits system’ of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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