Maternity hospital

A maternity hospital specializes in caring for women during pregnancy and childbirth. It also provides care for newborn infants, and may act as a centre for clinical training in midwifery and obstetrics. Formerly known as lying-in hospitals, most of them, like cottage hospitals, have been absorbed into larger general hospitals, where they operate as the maternity department.

Kätilöopisto, a former maternity hospital in Helsinki, Finland in 2019

In a maternity hospital in Yakutsk, USSR in 1981

History

The premises of the former General Lying-In Hospital, now a hotel

Maternity hospitals in the United Kingdom can be traced back to a number of 18th century establishments in London and Dublin. Prior to these foundations, childbirth was a domestic occasion. The term coined for these establishments, but now archaic, is "a lying-in hospital", referring to the custom of lying-in, prolonged bedrest after childbirth, better known now as postpartum confinement.^{[citation needed]}

The first noted lying-in hospital appears to be one founded by Sir Richard Manningham in Jermyn Street, London, in 1739 and which evolved into the Queen Charlotte's Maternity Hospital. A better documented foundation is that of the Dublin Lying-In Hospital, established in 1745 by Bartholomew Mosse, and which served as a model for three subsequent London foundations: the British Lying-In Hospital, a 1749 establishment in Holborn; the 1750 City of London Lying-In Hospital, in the City; and the General Lying-In Hospital on Westminster Bridge Road, established in 1767.^[1][2][3] A number of other such hospitals were formed in the mid-18th century. All of these were run by male physicians, women being blocked from completing training as doctors until the 1870s.^{[citation needed]}

The first maternity hospital founded and run by a woman was Elizabeth Garrett Anderson's New Hospital for Women, which evolved from an existing dispensary in the 1770s, and was renamed in 1918 the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital.^[4][5][6][7] Its work continues in the modern Elizabeth Garrett Anderson maternity wing of University College Hospital, part of UCLH NHS Foundation Trust.^{[citation needed]}

Today

The Portland Hospital in central London was created in 1983 as a private hospital, i.e. not part of the National Health Service. Also in 1983, the Rosie Hospital opened in Cambridge, next to Addenbrooke's Hospital.^{[citation needed]}

The National Maternity Hospital, Dublin is the largest mother-and-baby hospital in Ireland.^{[citation needed]}