Important points of comparison exist in the architecture of hospital records in London and Ontario. All hospitals maintained a corpus of similar records which became more complex and voluminous in the last quarter of the nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth centuries. Homogeneity in the records was conferred by the similarity of record types which expressed functional purposes common to all hospitals, while unique features in the accumulated records were related either to the special functions of some hospitals or to differences in administration. In both London and Ontario similar patterns in the composition and growth of records overshadow specific differences, many of them related to the timing of change rather than to the substance of innovation.

ISSN 0823-2105

© 2012 Canadian Society for the History of Medicine/
    Société canadienne d'histoire de la médecine