In the annual presidential address to the American Society of Church History (ASCH), Esther Chung-Kim discusses the pivotal role of pastors, physicians, and lay healers in responding to poverty and illness in early modern Europe. She offers that their involvement shaped both social welfare and medical care. Reflecting the values of biblical examples, both Catholics and Protestants established institutions to support the sick and poor. Promoting practices of care for the sick, religious leaders, pious physicians, and lay healers promoted charity through medicine, in various efforts to expand access to care. Protestant reformers sought to shift responses to illness away from saintly intercession and instead toward direct appeals to God and natural medicine, seen as a divine gift. In some cities, Reformed ordinances mandated medical support for the poor by institutionalizing care during epidemics. The convergence of religious and medical reform, aided by print culture, resulted in Christian thinkers recognizing medicine as a form of God’s providence in nature (thereby encouraging a positive view of medicine), and physicians promoting religious reform in their medical treatises. In the early modern era, Catholics and Protestants both strengthened the link between Christianity and medicine with theological and practical ways to show care and concern for the sick.

Did late Victorian strikers have a right to poor relief? Historians have suggested they did not. Scholars point out that nineteenth-century strikers rarely turned to the Poor Law for assistance, and when they did, during a colliers' strike in South Wales in 1898, Poor Law officials were taken to court by disgruntled coal companies. In the subsequent High Court ruling known as the Merthyr Tydfil judgment of 1900, the Master of the Rolls decided that the policy of relieving the strikers had indeed been unlawful. However, it is argued in this article that the judgment has not been properly understood by historians. Contemporaries did not think it obvious that the giving of poor relief to strikers was illegal. On the contrary, in 1898, there was widespread agreement that Poor Law officials had no choice but to support destitute strikers; the Poor Law demanded they relieve the men and their families, a point confirmed in an earlier High Court ruling in 1899. Thus, Poor Law scholars should view the Merthyr judgment as a notable innovation in Poor Law policy. Labor historians should see the ruling as part of the employers' counteroffensive against the labor movement of the 1890s and 1900s. Merthyr came out of the same febrile atmosphere that produced the Taff Vale judgment. That its true significance has been forgotten can largely be explained by the labor movement's unease at having a striker's right to poor relief confirmed in 1899. Respectable workers, union leaders averred, should not be supported out of the poor rates.