Sanitary economics: or, our medical charities, as they are, and as they ought to be / [Alexander Patrick Stewart].

  • Stewart, Alexander P. (Alexander Patrick), 1813-1883
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sanitary economics: or, our medical charities, as they are, and as they ought to be / [Alexander Patrick Stewart]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    . frequent exhaustion of body, depression of spirits, and utter unfitness for intellectual exertion after the day’s work is done ; the weeks, and sometimes months, of broken health and dyspeptic languor; the continual risk of life in his attempts to combat the great enemy in his dreariest fastnesses and most malignant aspects ; the sudden summons which, in these haunts of death, he may receive at any moment, from a career of promise scarce begun, to the bar of the Eternal Judge. Surely, if any man can be said to have made good his title to a standing supply of medicines for his house¬ hold, it is the dispensary medical officer. Yet he would scorn to avail himself, for such a purpose, of the public charity to which he contributes so largely. If, then, his wealthy and titled neighbours, who have all their lives been dandled in the lap of luxury, or those on whose honest exertions a kind and liberal Providence has smiled so sweetly, that in present affluence they have almost forgotten former want and toil, do, from motives of economy, stoop to, and resolutely insist on that, in consenting to which he would feel himself to have lost caste, why should not they be reckoned the pariahs of the philanthropic commonwealth ? But it were most unjust to include under one sweeping and indiscriminate anathema even all those who make this objectionable use of medical charities, much more the whole body of subscribers. Many there are who give their donations without the most distant thought of making a gain of charity. And B