An asylum, or hospital-home, for two hundred patients : constructed on the principle of adaptation of various parts of the house to varied needs and mental states of inhabitants : with plans, etc. / by T.S. Clouston.

  • Clouston, T. S. (Thomas Smith), 1840-1915.
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An asylum, or hospital-home, for two hundred patients : constructed on the principle of adaptation of various parts of the house to varied needs and mental states of inhabitants : with plans, etc. / by T.S. Clouston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    suitable special accommodation for them, that this accommo- dation must be all on the ground-floor, that it had better be apart from the rest of the asylum, and yet not too far from either the central kitchen or the medical officers' quarters. The patients cannot go to the central dining-room for their meals : so a dining-room must be provided (5). A certain amount of minor cooking, and keeping beef-tea, &c, hot, must be done too : therefore it must contain a small kitchen. As a man and his wife are intended to have the chief charge of this ward, a kitchen adds much to the element of domes- ticity. Among the patients in the sick-ward of an asylum, some had better sleep in dormitories, others in single rooms. Some of the former require to be in bed all day, others only a part of it, and others can be up all day. The greatest variety, too, exists among the patients who need to sleep in single rooms. There is an enormous difference between the general paralytic in the end of the second stage of his dis- ease, who is restless and noisy at night, though so weak that he stumbles and falls about his room, very dirty in his habits, rubbing his fseces over the walls of his room, unable to feed or clean or dress himself, and the quiet, slightly demented, consumptive or hemiplegic patient, who needs to be in bed all day, but whose cough or helplessness would disturb the others in a dormitory. Both of those need single bedrooms; but it would be undesirable, if it could be avoided, to place them next each other. I have never yet seen a sick ward whose construction and arrangements seemed to me so varied as the requirements of its patients. The building I have planned is a separate one-story block (E), three hundred and forty feet from the central kitchen, connected by a prolongation of the winter-garden corridor (17). It consists of a central corridor (1), roof-lighted, ten feet wide, into which open on the back of the building, on entering it from the corridor (H), two storerooms (2 and 3), one for brushes, pails, &c, and the other for linen and clothes. Then comes the kitchen, with a small cooking-range and the means of washing and storing dishes. * If the dinners are cooled in coming along the corridor from the great kitchen, they can be easily warmed here; and as the serving of the meals to so many helpless people takes a considerable time, from many of them having to be fed, the meals of