The Army way of opening a hospital is to transfer to it convalescent cases from other hospitals. When asked at a later date why this custom prevailed, since it did not make things easier for the receiving hospital, a senior officer said that there was nothing to recommend the custom, but that that was the way they did it. In every hospital there were cases which, for some reason or another, the staff was more or less glad to pass on; and an order to transfer twenty-five or fifty walking cases meant that the troublesome, the idle, the grousing, or those who were unsatisfactory for some reason, were collected and moved on. On the 12th of May 1915 Endell Street received a hundred convalescent cases from various hospitals in the London District. That night, the convoys from France began to arrive, and a letter written on the 14th to hasten the supply of knives and forks states that on that date there were two hundred and forty-six men in the hospital. It was open just as a spell of heavy fighting began, and within a week all its beds were available and all were full.
The first month was a difficult one. The work poured into the hospital, making new and heavy demands upon every one. Equipment was short, and the women had everything to learn and no one to advise or help them. They had to find things out for themselves, and some months later much time was spent in correcting, by the light of experience, entries in registers and returns which had been incorrectly made in those early days. Gradually order was evolved. The women adapted themselves to the conditions, and the wheels of the establishment went round more easily each week. The strain of those first days was severe; the staff was weary in mind and body; but the general eagerness to make things go right triumphed, and the organisation developed and established itself.
It soon became evident that Endell Street was a favourably situated hospital, and that it would not lack for work. It was near to the railway stations, and through all the years that followed its beds were kept very full and the proportion of cot cases—as against sitting cases—coming into its wards was a high one. It had a busy casualty room, too, where men from neighbouring stations reported sick in the mornings, and into which men on leave, or men absent without leave, would wander for more or less severe ailments. Men suffering from accidents or fits or drunkenness were liable to arrive in ambulances at all hours of the day and night, and more serious cases, from billets, from hotels or from the St. Albans military district were constantly received there. In 1917 to 1919 numbers of pensioners came for treatment, and hundreds of men were examined and certified before demobilisation, or else attended after demobilisation to have the Army form relating to disabilities and assessments made up. The average number of attendances in the casualty room totalled not less than five thousand each year.
THE CHIEF SURGEON WITH GARRETT AND WILLIAM
(Photo, Reginald Haines)
THE DOCTOR-IN-CHARGE SEES MEN IN HER OFFICE