The affairs of the Infirmary and Lunatic Hospital continued till Michaelmas 1790 when a particular scrutiny was made into the Rules and Government of the Charities; and so many additions and alterations made in them that almost an entire New System was introduced. Six Physicians and Six Surgeons were then appointed to manage the whole business of their profession. Compleat Assistance was provided for the Poor in every Malady to which they are Subject and for which the Art of Man has yet found a remedy.' BY 1790, the Manchester Infirmary had existed for almost forty years. It had been founded in 1752, one of a series of voluntary hospitals which had spread across the provinces in the 1750s and 1760s.2 They were the central charities in increasingly prosperous towns, means by which leading citizens could demonstrate a collective responsibility for the poor, and arenas in which physicians and the better-qualified surgeons could establish a public presence and demonstrate their skills. In 1780, there was little to distinguish Manchester's Infirmary from those in many county towns, which were to continue little changed for a century or so.The Infirmary revolution of 1790 came about because Manchester had begun to change rapidly. The 1780s saw a large inflow of capitalists and labourers, and with them came professional men, including Scottish-trained physicians anxious to use their scientific training to create successful careers among the rising bourgeoisie. Such men, together with the educated sons of established merchants, formed a radical group within the cultural circle of older Whig reformers. We shall argue in this paper that the Infirmary revolution was the major local success of these radicals before they were dispersed by the counter-revolutionary pressures of the 1790s. To do so, we set the history of the hospital firmly within the history of the town, and we examine in the history of Manchester a cluster of national political campaigns -about slavery, Dissenters' rights, and the Regency crisis. Arnold Thackray, in his study of the early
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