Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T14:45:56.292Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A lesson from the history of psychiatry: competitive tendering for services and defective central heating systems in Georgian New Bethlem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Robert Howard
Robert Howard*
Affiliation:
The Maudsley Hospital, Denmark Hill, London SE5 8AZ
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Entries in the minute books of the New Bethlem Hospital Building Committee from 1813–1816 contain details of the commissioning, installation and subsequent extensive modification of a system for heating the hospital. The system adopted was chosen principally for its cheapness, but in a manner that may seem familiar in the current climate of competitive tendering, with adoption of the cheapest proposal; through the incompetence of its manufacturer it was to prove problematic and dangerous.

Type
Sketches from the history of psychiatry
Information
Psychiatric Bulletin , Volume 15 , Issue 9 , September 1991 , pp. 566 - 568
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1991
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.