Elderly people in institutions of care in the 19th and early 20th century (exemplified by the Philanthropic Society in Cracow)

Abstract

The article discusses the organization of the care for elderly people in the 19th and early 20th c., in particular the normative assumptions of such an activity as well as the practical solu-tions applied, as exemplified by the documents of the Philanthropic Society in Cracow. The author used both printed sources and unpublished manuscripts preserved in the Jagiellonian Library, left by Count Krzysztof Mieroszewski (1857–1915), a publicist and Catholic activist, a member and councellor of the Society since 1904. A comparative analysis of the nineteenth-century statutes and internal regulations of the Society, especially the manuscript of an extensive set of regulations for homes for the elderly and orphans managed by the Society surviving in Mieroszewski’s collection of documents, give an interesting insight into the ideas of the proper organization of the everyday life of the poor and elderly supported by public charity. The research reveals that models of institutional care following the assumptions of the European idea of philanthropy, popular at the beginning of the 19th c., supplemented with local regulations reminiscent of some rues of religious orders, were cultivated by Cracow philanthropists even at the beginning of the 20th c., despite changes that had occurred in that field.