Names of the wards and numbers of beds in each of the buildings of the Greenwich Hospital. (42)
Modern-day students of history learn the use of primary sources almost from the minute they enter an undergraduate program; some, from high schools with engaged history faculty or by taking part in programs like History Day in Massachusetts, before then. Analyzing, closely reading, considering, debating, and writing about primary sources is a key part of any history student’s education.
What makes today’s digital highlight particularly interesting, then, is that not only is it now a primary source in its turn but it uses primary sources in their entirety.
John Cooke and John Maule’s An Historical Account of the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich (1789), starts with the reprinting in full of the government documents which allowed for the creation of the hospital, started in the late 17th century and completed in the early decades of the 18th century, to care for sailors and others working for the expansion of British commercial and military interests.
The lengthy documents are not the most fascinating to read and Maule and Cooke provide little by way of commentary, preferring to allow the documents to speak for themselves. The authors must have thought the sources either interesting or important enough to reprint in their entirety — even down to the long list of names of the commission named to plan the hospital. They chose to give their readers the opportunity to engage directly with the source documentation for the institution under discussion. A modern-day historian would be more likely to quote and analyze selections from the documents to support a specific argument; a whole document would likely be reprinted as an appendix or, possibly, taken live as a Website with a URL for reference from the bibliography.
In this case, Maule and Cooke chose to make the founding of the institution they wished to discuss appear unimpeachable, set in stone both legal and actual, and here, so to speak, are the documents to prove it. There is nothing inherently better or worse about each approach; it all depends on what audience you want to reach and what kind of argument you wish to make. One of the things that makes the Historical Account particularly interesting, then, is the change it demonstrates between how history has been written and how it is being written now.
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!