Provincial medical charities.

Date:
[1865?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Provincial medical charities. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    The words taken as the title of this article represent an aggregate of interests that probably far surpasses in its vastness any conjectural esti- mate that our readers would be likely to form. Omitting the county of Middlesex from consideration, more than 750,000 of the sick poor are treated, year after year, in the provincial hospitals and dispensaries of England alone. The annual Medical Directory contains a list of these institutions, with the names of their physicians and surgeons, the number bf their beds, and the sum-total of their patients for the previous year. In many respects this list is defective, and, by reason of its omissions, the information we have compiled from it must represent something less .than the truth. It shows the existence, in England, of 292 provincial Institutions for the relief of sickness. Of these, 156 make up a total of 10,933 beds, and are called hospitals or infirmaries; while the remain- ing 136 are without beds, and are called dispensaries. In each division there are institutions devoted to some special disease, or to the diseases of some particular organ ; but the majority undertake to combat all the ailments from which humanity suffers, with occasional limitations against such as are contagious, or the direct results of personal vice, or are supposed, in the present state of knowledge, to be incurable. The patients are of three classes : in-patients, who occupy the beds, out- patients, who attend at stated times for medical examination and physic, and home-patients, who are visited at their own residences. As a rule, the first class is peculiar to the hospital or infirmary, the third class to the dispensary, and the second class is common to both, the dispensary attempt- ing to compensate for its want of beds by employing its medical officers to attend the more serious illnesses at the homes of the sufferers. During the year 1863, the 10,933 beds were occupied by 81,972 persons, and the out-patients and home-patients amounted to no less than 686,658, making together a gross total of 768,630 cases. To combat the enormous amount of disease which these figures represent, the institutions in question have the services of 1,411 phy- sicians and surgeons, exclusive of paid officers, such as resident or house- surgeons and* dispensers. Of the 1,411, however, only 1,135 are actually engaged in duty, the remaining 276 being “extraordinary,” or “consult- ing” officials in addition to the working staff. In old and well-established hospitals and dispensaries, the consulting medical officeis are usually men who have retired from the ordinary work, and who carry away into retirement a merely complimentary title. In new and struggling institu- tions the nominal office of consulting -surgeon is often conferred upon the