An essay on hospital mortality : based upon the statistics of the hospitals of Great Britain for fifteen years / by Lawson Tait.

  • Tait, Lawson, 1845-1899.
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An essay on hospital mortality : based upon the statistics of the hospitals of Great Britain for fifteen years / by Lawson Tait. 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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    sixteen to twenty in a space of thirty feet, and each set of blankets had to cover three or four. Miss Nightingale tells us that in 1855, at the Scutari Hospital, the men were laid on palliasses on the floor as close as they could lie; there were two rows of beds in the Barrack Hospital corridors, where two persons could hardly pass abreast between foot and foot; and that in seven short months we lost a third of our heroic army from disease alone, and that disease of a purely preventible kind, much of it having the same scorbutic and bloody flux character which Howard lamented eighty years before. This lesson was such a terrible one, and its experimental results excited such popular wrath, that it is never likely to he repeated. But we have had it urged upon us by Howard, Miss Nightingale, and many others, and last of all by Simpson, that a loss of life as great, though not so striking, is con- stantly going on in our civil hospitals, and that it may be checked by exactly the same means which in 1855-6 brought the disease death rate of our Crimean army down from 40 per cent, to less than 3 per cent. That there is some truth in this no one who has seen much hospital work can doubt for a moment, though to what extent it is true must, I fear, long remain a mystery ; and that chiefly for the reason that it is almost impossible to obtain data which are not open to objections more or less forcible. How carelessly kept are the records of most of our medical charities none know save those who have had to examine them. The managing authorities are usually content with publishing a report which contains a balance-sheet and a hare statement of a number of patients which have been treated during the year, often without mentioning so important a feature as