Letter to the governors and council of St. Thomas's Hospital on the question of site.

  • Turle, James.
Date:
[1863]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Letter to the governors and council of St. Thomas's Hospital on the question of site. 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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    it ? We may fairly prosume that the amount of surgical skill to be met with iu the two series of hospitals is equal; and we believe that the same rules of practice prevail in each; i. e., the ordinary lateral operation was performed in each in almost all the cases. Mr. Hutchinson ascribes the difference partly to the superior sanitary advantages of the provincial hospitals, partly to the effect of intemperance and other regularities on the system of the London patient. Intemperenee is, however, I fear, very nearly as common a vice with the countryman as the citizen, while deficient food is a misfortune which the poor man has to endure far more constantly in countiy than in town districts. It is to Mr. Hutchinson^s exertions that we are indebted for the series of hospital statistics, more or less regularly published in the Medical Times and Gazette during the years 1854, 1855, 1856, 1857, 1858, and 1859. They are the only statistics of the kind that have ever been attemjited, or, at all events, ever been published either in England or elsewhere. Indeed, until the recently published statistics of Bartholomew's, Guy's, and St. Thomas's Hospitals, no authorized general statistics of any hospital with which I am acquainted have ever been made public, with one honourable exception—namely, the statistics of the Bristol Infirmary for the years 1848 and 1849, admirably drawn up by the then house-surgeon, Mr. A. Hore. Mr. Hutchinson's sta- tistics, therefore, were, at the time they were published, the only authentic records of civil hospital practice of sufficient extent to be in any way available for scientific purposes; and they still stand alone in this respect, so far as provincial hospitals are concerned. In regard to their accuracy, Mr. Hutchinson has assured me that he took the greatest care to test the correctness of the returns which were made to him by the resident medical officers and house-surgeons of the different hospitals, and I can myself testify to the strictness of his inquiries and his supervision of the cases, as I myself held one of those offices during a portion of the time. In the compilation of Tables II. and III., 1 have made most careful and impartial use of his statistics for the years 1855-8. Those for the country hospitals are not, however, simple additions of all his cases, for this reason : Many of the hospitals, the results of which are given in the provincial list can by no manner of means be ranked as country hospitals. Of this kind are the various Liverpool hospitals, those of Birmingham, Leeds, Hull, New- castle, and Glasgow. The cases furnished to the statistics from these hospitals were about as numerous as those from all 15