From Home to Hospital

Abstract

This chapter explores the senses and emotions that attended living with and dying from cancer in the early nineteenth century. The archives of The Middlesex Hospital consist of registers of cancer patients from 1792 through to the twentieth century, and a potted selection of casebooks. This chapter, therefore, tells the stories of sixty patients from 1805 to 1836. From these case notes, flesh and blood can be added to the lived experience of cancer and go some way towards recovering the patient voice. We can follow in their footsteps from home to hospital, and in multiple literal and metaphorical ways appreciate the distances they travelled in their ‘cancer journeys’.