Bartholomew's Hospital, founded by a Catholic monk, in the hoary past, is the oldest and largest hospital in London, as its students are the wildest and most reckless in the metropolis. The number of in-door patients is 7,000; out-door, 100,000, annually, and the yearly income is £32,000. There are 700 beds, 36 professors, and 500 students.
The St. Thomas' Hospitals, now in process of construction at the Surrey Side of the Thames, in Lambeth, opposite the Houses of Parliament, will combine a number of hospitals for Special Diseases, and will accommodate about 2,000 patients, with as many beds, and will have an income of £50,000 a year, or more.
It is impossible to think of any disease, complaint, deformity, or injury to any member or organ of the body, which has not its special hospital or institution for relief or cure, in the English metropolis. There are homes for distressed widows, for Asiatics, Africans, and South Sea Islanders, a Benevolent Society of Female Musicians, one for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, a Life-Boat Society, Homes for Teaching the Blind to read, for Governesses, a Shoe-Black Society, and, in fact, all classes of indigent and impoverished persons are provided for.
INTERESTING SIGHT.
The Sick Children's Hospital is one of the best and most needed institutions in London. This hospital was opened eighteen years ago, and has among its patrons the excessively pious Prince of Wales, and the lady whom he admired so much—the wife of Sir Charles Mordaunt, as also the highest ecclesiastical authority in England, the Archbishop of Canterbury. This Hospital for Sick Children is situated at No. 49 Great Ormond street, Bloomsbury, in an old-fashioned house built in the time of Queen Anne. The annual income of this hospital is about £25,000 a year, with 100 beds, including about a dozen at Highgate and Margate, the latter for those children who require sea air. It has about 600 in-door and 12,000 out-door patients, annually.
A sick child among the rich has, at least, solace in its sickness, besides every chance for its recovery that money can supply. A sick child among the poor may have attendance or not, as the case may be, but its father and its mother in London have but little time to bestow upon its sufferings. It is, perhaps, uncared for and all but abandoned to battle with disease without help. It is for the children of the needy poor that this hospital is established and is carried on.
No child suffering from small pox is admitted into the house, nor are any cases of rickets, hip joint or scrofulous disease of the spine or joint. They are refused for three reasons: because they are quite incurable, because they require nothing but rest for many months, and because good diet and fresh air, continued for months or years, are essential to improvement.
Glad children's laughter may be heard within those old walls, and pretty little voices murmuring to each other, as the tiny sick people chatter to their next bedside friends and neighbors. Sometimes a little tired one, wearied from weakness, lies still watching the blue scroll on the ceiling, or trying to make out what all the pink-cheeked and powdered ladies are doing upon the frescoes of the old-fashioned walls.
Each child has its cot to itself, and besides those in the house myriads of children are brought each year, by their mothers, to be seen by the doctors and nurses. In the room where mothers bring their children is a box, affixed to the wall, with a printed solicitation for pence, and fifty pounds a year is collected in this way, which is devoted to sending children to the watering places who are getting convalescent and need sea air.
The Queen, and other members of her family, are accustomed to send yearly donations of toys and jimcracks for the amusement of the children; and proud ladies may be seen daily moving among the sick beds with all kinds of gifts and childish luxuries, and who shall say that the faces of these beautiful girls, and the toys they bring, do not help most signally to establish convalescence, for what sick child ever suffered without appreciating a kindly smile, a wooden horse, a cart, a Punch, or a Noah's ark.