Life in a hospital : being an East End chapter / by Walter Besant.

  • Besant, Walter, 1836-1901.
Date:
[1883?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Life in a hospital : being an East End chapter / by Walter Besant. 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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    please, see the room where they conduct the post-mortem examinations and the mortuary. But if 600 die, 6,400 are sent away either cured or relieved without counting out-patients. Here is an anny to think upon. Death hurls his murderous diseases upon this great city ; they strike down 65,000 of the poor men, women, and children in one year, besides those who are rich enough to pay for their own treatment. Out of the 65,000, 7,000 are brought to the beds of this great house, while the remaining 58,000 become out-patients. Sixty-five thousand ! Apart from accidents, this means that four or five per cent, of the population are every year attacked by some disease or other. Now disease is nothing in the world but the result of our own ignorance, vice, or stupidity, and therefore the existence of a hospital is necessary for our own sakes if we are to push hack year after year, more and more, the barriers of this ignorance. In the after time, when we are dust and ashes, it will doubtless be argued that the ignorance of the nineteenth century in medicine was inconceivable, colossal; that diseases — diseases of the human frame—were actually prevalent, and that, though they were sometimes cured, they were only beginning to be prevented; and that the miseries of human life must, through the plague and torment of these diseases, since then entirely abolished, have been intolerable. One thing, at least, is certain. When one looks up and down these wards one cannot but feel, perhaps for the first time, how poor, mean, and narrow are most of the lives which are led, and how unbounded is the capacity for happiness with which we are endowed. The love of equal justice is not a greater force in the human soul than the capacity and desire for happiness. Why one