A letter to the vice-chairman of the Board of Management of the Radcliffe Infirmary on the questions to be considered at the meetings summoned for May 17 & 31, 1866 / [Henry W. Acland].

  • Acland, Henry W. (Henry Wentworth), 1815-1900.
Date:
1866
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter to the vice-chairman of the Board of Management of the Radcliffe Infirmary on the questions to be considered at the meetings summoned for May 17 & 31, 1866 / [Henry W. Acland]. 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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    they stand, the wonder and admiration of other people. If they do not meet the growing wants, sooner or later public opinion forces the Government to supplement them by others, and they fall into decadence. Hospitals cannot be exempt from the operation of this social law. The best subscriptional Hospitals, managed by their humane and benevolent supporters, thrive with the advance of time; acquire new funds; gain fresh gratitude, prosper—if and u-Jien they ex- pand with the population, and add the new conquests of science to the possessions of a former period. In this I am giving utterance to no new or personal sentiments. It not only is but ought to be so. The following passage from the Sixth Report of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council, places what we are now discussing in a clearer light than perhaps I should venture to do when addressing myself to you :— “It would be foreign to my present purpose to discuss with any minuteness the vastly different degrees in which different hospitals endeavour to be useful to the public. But this is a matter w'hich, in respect of many charities, eminently deserves further criticism. And therefore I would again invite attention to the statements which Dr. Bristowe and Mr. Holmes make with regard to the effect of certain regulations in restricting the usefulness of hospitals. Espe- cially I must advert to the rules which prohibit the admis- sion of cases of contagious fever, and in effect exclude most other acute diseases from the benefit of hospital treatment. It seems to me that in such rules there is implied the dere- liction of a hospital’s most important functions. I cannot conceive any cases having more claim to hospital treatment than those cases of typhoid, and sometimes typhus fever, which the rules would expressly and rigidly exclude. To leave such cases in the ill-provided homes of the poor is not