When did the modern-day concept of the “nursing home” start becoming common? Did they exist at the turn of the (previous) century?
I’m only venturing a guess, as I have to go shopping with kids.
I think the idea would have started as a “rest home” for the elderly, kind of a private boarding house. I know when we put Grandma in such a place in a small town, that was the norm. This was 50 years ago.
And the use of “home” in the phrase probably arose out of a conscious motivation to suggest snuggly warmth and goodness. Ad copy used by realtors and developers almost always says they’re selling homes, not houses, and I expect the motivation for doing that is much the same.
Actually the building I’m working in right now was built in the 1860s to be a “chronic hospital” – in other words, to provide medical care for people with long-term illnesses.
That’s about as close a definition of a nursing home as I’m going to find without a lot of searching.
I think nursing homes are the remnants of the hospitals of old. Back in thr day, you rarely went to the hospital if sick. If you weren’t wealthy, you did nothing or had some home remedies. If you were wealthy, a doctor came to you. You’d go to a hospital if you were terminally ill, or were contagious with something like influenza od TB. Many mentally ill were also in hospitals, it was basically ap lace to either die, or be away from society so you couldn’t do any harm to it today.
With the advent of germ theory and sanitation, hospitals were suddenly useful for actually treating sick people. But, what to do with the mentally ill who still need to be sequestered? Easy! An asylum! But, we still have old, infeble, senile people who might also danger society. Well, give them their own asylum!
Eventually, it evolved into a nursing home, and it’s less of a place to no longer harm society, as it is a place for them to (hopefully) finish off their life in a better manner, and with better care, than they might otherwise.
I searched a bit further, and found an 1891 story in the LA Times about the founding of a “cottage hospital” in Santa Barbara that year. It sounds like this would fit the bill of what we know today as a nursing home in the US, as it included kitchens, reception room, etc. It further said the concept came about in 1888, etc. I’m not stating that I think it was invented in 1888, just that this would be a good time frame for such a thing.
As this excellent site explains in some detail, the real precursers of nursing homes in the US weren’t hospitals so much as poor farms, poorhouses etc. and later the charitable, nonprofit alternatives developed by various benevolent societies during the nineteenth century.