This is probably the best book about a Victorian workhouse anyone could read. Rogers is an important figure in the history of public healthcare in the UK, and as far as I am aware, was the only workhouse doctor who left a published memoir of what it was like to care for the sick poor in a Victorian workhouse. The book is a unique document of its time.

Joseph Rogers came from a Christian family in West Meon, Hampshire, and remembered his own father's reaction to the harsh New Poor Law of 1834, which was one of sorrow and pity for the poor. Rogers was not unaware that there were people who 'used the system', but they were a very small minority in a workhouse of 300+beds (a major hospital size) with 500+ residents [yes, there was bed-sharing in 1866] and where 90% of the residents were sick or diseased, about to give birth or new mothers, elderly infirm, disabled mentally ill, orphan children, or dying, and where the only nurses were other inmates. Rogers was the only doctor there, working alone to alleviate suffering, and paying for the entire drug bill out of his wages. He could not walk away. When you read his book you will understand why.

I first found Rogers's book in the 1970s when I was researching my book Death Dissection & the Destitute, and shared it with my future husband after we met. We researched his story further, and wrote about Rogers in the British Medical Journal in 1989 and we also suggested that Rogers deserved a blue plaque, as his work to reform the workhouse system for the sick poor had a fundamentally positive impact in the UK, akin to that of Florence Nightingale in the charitable sector, but much less well-known. Rogers has since been honoured with a blue plaque on his old home at 33 Dean Street Soho.

The building in which Rogers worked still stands in London's Cleveland Street, near the Telecom Tower, having been for many years the Out-patients' Department of the (now defunct) Middlesex Hospital. Recently threatened with demolition, the old workhouse - which dates originally from the 1770s - has now been listed Grade 2 for preservation. The campaign to save it hit the news worldwide when it was discovered that Charles Dickens had lived only 9 doors away for more than four years before he wrote Oliver Twist, so the place is very likely to have been an inspiration for that novel. See