St. James Infirmary Blues London's St. James Hospital, a religious foundation for the treatment of leprosy. His references list an article by Kenneth Lodewick. That article states, giving no reference or source for the idea, that the phrase "St. James Hospital" refers to a hospital of that name in London. There is some difficulty in this because the hospital in question closed in 1532 when Henry VIII acquired the land to build St James's Palace. Another possibility suggested by Higginbotham on the basis of his claim that the song "St. James Infirmary" dates at least from the early nineteenth century, is the Infirmary section
St. James Infirmary Blues of the St James Workhouse which the St. James Parish opened in 1725 on Poland Street, Piccadilly, and which continued well into the nineteenth century. This St. James Infirmary was contemporaneous with the estimated advent of the song "The Unfortunate Lad", but it is not the London Lock Hospital. Another difficulty is that, out of the early versions of the song mentioned in the references given by Goldstein, only the one collected by Cecil Sharp in the Appalachians in 1918, and one found in Canada in the 1920s, make use of the phrase "St. James". The liner notes link the