Our aged poor : a plea for Gillespie's Hospital : being a lecture delivered at a conversazione of the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, on 21st April 1865 / by by James D. Gillespie, M.D.

  • Gillespie, James Donaldson.
Date:
1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Our aged poor : a plea for Gillespie's Hospital : being a lecture delivered at a conversazione of the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, on 21st April 1865 / by by James D. Gillespie, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    suggested to George Heriot this method of disposal of his wealth, and, with very few exceptions, the same prominent idea, as regards Edinburgh at all events, has influenced subsequent wealthy testators. In the present day, however, it is notorious that the funds of some of the educational establishments have increased so enormously under the careful and praiseworthy administration of the parties to whom they have been intrusted, that puir Orphans and fatherless children are not now the only recipients of the charities ; and many parents who are well to do in the world, or at least not much pinched by poverty, can now boast that one, and perhaps more, of their children, have been educated gratuitously; and that they have been relieved from the expense of their education and main- tenance for six or eight years. I shall not here enter on the question, whether it is advisable to relieve parents from the obligations incumbent on them. The principle has for many years been the subject of argument in this city; it being held on the one hand, that it is right to remove their children from the control of wicked or improvident parents; while on the other it is argued, that such a procedure is tantamount to relieving unworthy objects of their obligations, and virtually is a direct encouragement of vice and improvidence. There caimot be much difference of o]Dinion as regards orphans or fatherless children. The benefits conferred on these helpless and generally destitute creatures by charitable edu- cational establishments being palpable to all; but evil conse- quences may sometimes result from doing too much, and such has, I think, been the case in Edinburgh. I firmly believe that the spirit of imitation has been carried too far here, and that charitable bequests might be directed with more benefit to the community into other channels; and as no indication of such a change has yet been evinced, hospitals for children still cropping out at comparatively short intervals, I shall endea- vour, in the following essay, to bring under your notice the claims of indigent old age;—to point out how much has been done for the young, how little for the old, and more especially shall I allude to the limited resources of Gillespie's Hospital, the only asylum for the aged poor, save the workhouse, now existing in Edinburgh.