The seven general hospitals of the metropolis, viz. St. Bartholome w's, St. Thomas's, Guy's, the London, the West minster, St. George's, and the Middlesex, contain constant ly about 1600 persons, and the annual number admitted is about 20,000.
We shall in this article take some notice of the suc cedaneous means which have served to complete the ob jects for which infirmaries are instituted.
It is for the relief of strangers and persons who have no permanent home that their utility is most highly con spicuous. In a large metropolis, numbers of labourers and artizans, who have resorted thither for employment, occupy lodgings at weekly payments, which they cannot retain when sickness deprives them of their earnings. Strangers, also, who come from a distance for a tempo rary purpose, occasionally fall sick. Such are the poor Highlanders, who annually migrate to the south of Scot land to assist in the harvest. Many of these obtain, in their casual sickness, a cure and an asylum at the Infirmary of i Edinburgh, and are justly enumerated among the most n teresting objects of public sympathy.
Yet it is not to strangers alone that these institutions are adapted. Many persons, who are domesticated in the places where infirmaries are situated, fall into sickness so overwhelming, that they require care than their re lations at home can bestow on them. Thus the family is not only deprived of the fruits of the industry of a member who has fallen sick, but ;is forced to renounce pa:: of its usual earnings in atm ding on this person. For these cases, infirmaries furnish a most seasonable relief.
There are, however, cases of a different description, for which they arc not suitable. Poor parsons are often afflict ed with slight complaints, which require medical care to prevent them from becoming dangetous, but to whom re moval from their own houses is not necessary, and would even prove injurious, by preventing them from following their usual occupations. This is frequently the case with the fathers and mothers of families, whose domestic duties, as well as their other exertions, are of great importance to society. For such persons dispensaries are formed, at which advice and medicine are given to patients who at tend on stated days. Many of these are too poor to pur
chase medical attendance, though able to make a scanty provision of the necessaries of life. There are other pa tients whose complaints are so tedious, that they could not be retained in infirmaries, without occupying the place of others who are capable of receiving greater benefit. There arc some diseases for which infirmaries are positively im• proper, as they require the free air, the varied scenery and exercise of the country, and may receive all the direction, and all the medicine they !iced. by occasionally repairing to a dispensary. The case is similar with the aged poor, labouring under complaints which admit of no radical cure.
Poor children, when they fall sick, require such a de gree of care as an infirmary does not afford, and their pa rents usually object to the removal of them from their own immediate superintendence. The necessities of this de scription of patients are not yet in most places sufficiently provided for. In Philadelphia there is a society of bene Nolcm females, who provide attendance in a separate place for the children of the poor, even when in health, in such a manner as to enable the mothers to follow some species of industry. One of their expedients for the ahridgnient of labour is, to have large cradles, consisting of fourteen or sixteen subdivisions, each of which admits a child, so that the attention of rocking them can be paid by one, while the opportunities of industry are afforded to the mothers in the same house in which their children arc thus provided for. Similar apartments might be assigned to the nursing and the medical attendance of sick children. With regard to children who arc able to walk, the sugges tions of Mr. Owen of Lanark Mills, for consulting their comfort and good behaviour, in a systematic and abridged manner, might be advantageously applied to the formation of an institution for the cure of their diseases. All the in stitutions now mentioned will, like infirmaries, be liable, in the first instance, to abuses; and the means of obviating these will gradually occur, in proportion as the facts be come known.