The need of care for the convalescent from the hospital standpoint / by S.T. Armstrong.

  • Armstrong, Samuel Treat.
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The need of care for the convalescent from the hospital standpoint / by S.T. Armstrong. 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.

    2/8 (page 2)
    tory in which certain mechanical, physical, or chem- ical procedures will entail certain definite products, a hospital cannot by certain similar procedures, in ap- parently similar morbid conditions, produce health. Many patients attain a normal condition in an aver- age time, but there are others affected by similar diseases who, at the expiration of the average time, are only more or less advanced in convalescence. Such patients cannot well be kept, until they have regained their health, in a hospital intended for an acute service, without detriment to the purposes of the institution and to their own convalescence. Many centuries ago Plato submitted the postulate “that in all well ordered states every individual has an occupation to which he must attend, and has therefore no leisure to spend in continually being ill. This we remark in the case of the artisan, but, ludi- crously enough, do not apply the same rule to peo- ple of the richer sort.” Pie goes on to say that “when a carpenter is ill he asks the physician for a rough and ready cure; an emetic or a purge 01 a cautery or the knife—these are his remedies. And if some one prescribes for him a course of dietetics, and tells him that he must swathe and swaddle his head, and all that sort of thing, he replies at once that he has no time to be ill, and that he sees no good in a life which is spent in nursing his disease to the neglect of his customary employment; and therefore bidding good bye to this sort of physician, he resumes his ordinary habits, and either gets well and lives and does his business, or, if his constitu- tion fails, he dies, and has no more trouble. While the hospital staff may not always keep in mind that their poor patients have no time to be sick, in general most measures are adopted that will carry the patient as expeditiously as possible through t convalescence. Then the patient is discharged to his