"About My Father's Business": Work Amidst the Sick, the Sad, and the Sorrowing

by Thomas Archer

To anyone acquainted with that strange neighbourhood which is represented by Gray's Inn Lane and all the queer jumble of courts and alleys that seem to shrink behind the shelter of the broad thoroughfare of Holborn, there is something consistent in the establishment of such a noble charity as this hospital in Gray's Inn Road. Its very position seems to indicate the nature and extent of its duties. Near the homes of poverty, the streets where people live who cannot go far to seek aid in their extremest need, it receives those who, breaking down through sudden disease, or requiring medical and surgical skill to relieve the pain and weakness of recurrent malady, have no resource but this to enable them to fulfil their one great desire "to get back to work." The causes of much of the sickness which sends patients thither may be preventable: they may be found in foul dwellings, impure water, insufficient clothing, want of proper food, alternate hunger and intemperance; but whatever may be its occasion, a remedy must be found for it. Till all that is preventable is prevented, the consequences will have to be mitigated, the fatal results averted where it is possible; and when boards of health and sanitary measures have done, there will still be sick men to heal, failing children to strengthen, weak and wasting women to restore.

It is well, then, that this Institution should stand as a landmark of that free charity which takes help where it is needed most; and this qualification is the more obvious when we turn from the sick wards to the accident wards, and remember that three great railway termini are close at hand, and others not far off; that all round that teeming neighbourhood men, women, and even children, are working at poor handicrafts, which render them liable to frequent injuries, and that in the crowded streets themselves—from the great busy thoroughfare of Holborn, to the bustle and confusion of the approaches to the stations at King's Cross—there is constant peril to life and limb.

There is something so remarkable in the external appearance of the building, such a military look about its bold front, such a suggestion of a cavalry yard about the broad open area behind this tall wooden entrance gate, that you begin to wonder how such a style of architecture should have been adopted for a hospital. The truth is that like many—nay, like most of our noblest work—this great provision for healing the sick began by not waiting for full-blown opportunities. The need was there, and the means that came to hand were used to meet it. This building was originally the barracks of that loyal and efficient regiment, the "Light Horse Volunteers," and so excellently had those gallant defenders of king and constitution provided for their own comfort and security, that when in 1842 the premises were vacant, and the lease for sale, the governors of the Royal Free Hospital became the purchasers, the long rooms were easily turned into ample, cheerful, and well-ventilated wards, and the various outbuildings and offices were quickly adapted to the reception of patients.

But the hospital had at that date been working quietly and effectually for above fourteen years. Fourteen years before its inauguration in Gray's Inn Road, this "free" hospital, which was not then "royal," had been commenced in Greville Street, Hatton Garden, and the immediate incident which led to its foundation is so suggestive, so inseparable from the recollection of the want which it was designed to alleviate, and from its own generous recognition of the unfailing freedom of true charity, that it might well be the subject of a memorial picture. Alas! it would be a tragic reminder of those days before any provision was made for extending medical aid to sufferers who had no credentials save humanity and their own deep necessity. It would be a grim reminder to us, also, that some of our great charities established for the relief of the sick are still trammelled with those restrictions which demand recommendations, to obtain which the applicant is often condemned to delay and disappointment. It would show us that our hospitals are not yet free.

Those of my readers who can remember the entrance to the broad highway of Holborn nearly fifty years ago—stay, that is going back beyond probable acknowledgment,—let me say those of us who knew Smithfield when it was a cattle market, who had heard of "Cow Cross," and been told of the terrible purlieux of Field Lane; who had occasionally caught a glimpse of that foul wilderness of courts that clustered about the Fleet Ditch; had read of Mr. Fagin, when "Oliver Twist" was first appearing in chapters, and had dim recollections of nursery tales about Bartlemy fair and "hanging morning" at the Old Bailey; those of us who remember the cries of drovers, and the lowing and bleating of herds and flocks in the streets on Sunday nights; the terrible descent of Snow Hill; the confusion and dismay of passengers and vehicles on the steep incline of Holborn Hill; the reek of all that maze of houses and hovels that lay in the valley; those of us, in short, who can carry our memories back for a few years beyond the time when the new cattle market was built at Islington, the pens and lairs of Smithfield demolished, the whole Holborn valley dismantled, only a remnant, a mere corner, of Field Lane being left standing after the great viaduct was built—can imagine what the church of St. Andrew was like when, with its dark and dreary churchyard, it stood on the slope of Holborn Hill, instead of being as it now is in a kind of subway. That churchyard, with its iron gate, was reached by stone steps, which were receptacles for winter rain and summer dust, the straw from waggons, the shreds and sweepings from adjacent shops, the dirt and refuse of the streets.

On those steps a young girl was seen lying one night, in the winter of 1827—lying helpless, lonely, perishing of disease and famine.

The clocks of St. Andrew, St. Sepulchre, St. Paul, had clanged and boomed amidst the hurry and the turmoil of the throng of passengers; had clanged and boomed till their notes might be heard above the subsiding roar of vehicles, and the shuffling of feet, till silence crept over the great city, and more distant chimes struck through the murky air, tolling midnight. Still that figure lay upon the cruel stones, under the rusty gate of the churchyard, as though, unfriended and unpitied by the world, she waited for admission to the only place in which she might make a claim in death, if not in life.

Not more than eighteen years old, she had wandered wearily from some distant place where fatal instalments of the wages of sin had done their work. She had come to London unknown, unnoted, to die. That she had come from afar is but a surmise; she may have been a dweller in this great city, lost amidst the stony desert of its streets, friendless with the friendlessness of the outcast or the wretched, to whom the acquaintances of to-day have little care or opportunity to become the solacers of to-morrow; she may have crept to that dark corner by the churchyard gate, amongst the rack and refuse of the street, as a place in which she, the unconsidered waste and refuse of our boasted civilisation, could most fitly huddle from the cold. She was not left actually to die there, but two days afterwards she passed out of the world where she had been unrecognised. Not without result, however.

Among those who had witnessed the distressing occurrence was a surgeon, Mr. William Marsden, who for some time before had repeatedly seen cause to lament, that with all our endowed hospitals, our great medical schools, and the advance of scientific knowledge, the sick poor could only obtain relief by means of letters of recommendation and other delay, until the appointed days for admission. The sight that he had witnessed awoke him to fresh energy. He determined to establish a medical charity, where destitution or great poverty and disease should be the only necessary credentials for obtaining free and immediate relief. His honest benevolent purpose did not cool; in February in the following year (1828), the house in Greville Street was open as a free hospital, and it was taken under the royal patronage of George IV., the Duke of Gloucester becoming its president.

King William IV. succeeded George IV. as the patron of this free hospital, and one of the earliest manifestations of the interest of our Queen in public charitable institutions was the expressed desire of her Majesty to maintain the support which it had hitherto received, and to confer upon it the name of the Royal Free Hospital.