The expenses of the King’s County Hospital, Long Island, for 1857, amounted to $75,300. About ten per cent. of the patients treated were venereal sufferers, and the cost for them amounts to $7530 per year, or $145 per week.
In the Brooklyn City Hospital the proportion of venereal patients is twenty-seven per cent. of the aggregate. The total annual expenses are $17,200, and the amount incurred on account of this disease is therefore $4644 per year, or $89 per week.
In the Seaman’s Retreat, Staten Island, New York, twenty-four per cent. of the inmates suffer from venereal disease. The expenses during the year 1857 were $43,500, of which $10,540 per year, or $203 per week, must be considered the proportion rendered necessary by syphilis.
To ascertain the amount expended for private medical assistance it will be necessary to recapitulate the outlay of the public institutions mentioned.
| Institutions. | Yearly Outlay. | Weekly Outlay. | ||
| Island Hospital, Blackwell’s Island | $22750 | $438 | ||
| Bellevue Hospital, New York | 7000 | 135 | ||
| Nursery Hospital, Randall’s Island | 8500 | 163 | ||
| Emigrants’ Hospital, Ward’s Island | 7075 | 136 | ||
| City Hospital, New York | 8260 | 159 | ||
| Dispensaries | 728 | 14 | ||
| King’s County Hospital, Long Island | 7530 | 145 | ||
| Brooklyn City Hospital, Long Island | 4644 | 89 | ||
| Seaman’s Retreat, Staten Island | 10540 | 203 | ||
| Total | 77027 | 1482 |
These totals must be multiplied by four, and the product will show the amount paid for private medical assistance as $5928 weekly, or $308,108 yearly. This is calculated on too liberal a scale, for no one believes that an individual requiring professional aid can obtain it so economically in private life as in a public institution; nor would even the fact that in the latter case the patients are boarded and supplied with all necessaries more than counterbalance the sums which must be paid for individual medical attendance. The desire not needlessly to exaggerate facts which are sufficiently comprehensive without such a procedure is the only reason that induces so low an estimate.
But there are yet other items of expenditure which must be noticed before the long array is completed. Foremost of these is the cost for support of abandoned women in the Work-house and Penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island. The proportion of females committed to the Work-house during 1857 was three fifths of the total commitments. It is not asserted that all these were prostitutes, but it is certain that the larger part were unchaste, and for argument’s sake we will take the ratio as two abandoned to one virtuous woman, the latter representing the class whom poverty, sickness, or friendlessness may have driven to accept a shelter in the institution. The expenses of the Work-house for the year amounted to $76,000, and the share of cost incurred on behalf of prostitutes would therefore be $30,400 per year, or $585 per week.
The females sentenced to the Penitentiary from courts of criminal jurisdiction during 1857 amount to twenty-seven per cent. of the total number incarcerated. It will violate no probability to assume that all these women were prostitutes; there may be exceptions to the rule, but so rare are they as not to invalidate the principle. The Penitentiary was supported during 1857 at an outlay to the tax-payers of nearly $89,000, and the proportion chargeable to prostitutes, at the ratio given above, is $24,030 per year, or $462 per week.
A farther portion of the expenses of the Work-house and Penitentiary might very plausibly be included in the list; namely, the share incurred by the maintenance of those men who owe their imprisonment either to crimes committed at the instigation of common women, or for the sake of supporting them; or to a course of idleness and dissipation resulting from the companionship of prostitutes. To pursue this subject in all its minutiæ would lead to the conclusion that nearly every male prisoner owes his confinement, less or more remotely, to one or the other of these causes, and hence it could be argued that all the expenses of male imprisonment should be taken into this account. On the other hand, such a course could be opposed with the plea that crimes which send men to Blackwell’s Island are only indirect results of the system under discussion, and to recognize them would force the recognition of many other indirect consequences daily occurring elsewhere. Strictly speaking, the position is scarcely demonstrable enough to form an arithmetical calculation, but its moral certainty is so far acknowledged as to make it a serious matter of reflection in connection with the attendant evils of prostitution.
To resume: About fifty-five per cent. of the population of the Alms-houses, Blackwell’s Island, are females. Some of these are old decrepit women whom it would be impossible to consider as prostitutes; others are virtuous women whose poverty has driven them there; but many are broken down prostitutes who have lost whatever of attraction they once possessed, and with ruined health and debilitated constitutions it is impossible for them to exist even in the lowest brothels. They make the Alms-house their last resting-place, and there await the final summons which shall close their career of sin and misery. Yet another class in this institution is composed of women with young children. Some claim to be respectable married women, while others are known as disreputable characters; but the former have little to support their pretensions except their own assertion, and collateral testimony sometimes invalidates that. It is not an uncharitable conclusion, that at least one half of the female inmates of the Alms-house owe their dependence upon charity to their own prostitution. The support of the Alms-house in 1857 cost the city of New York $63,000, and the proportion resulting from prostitution, on the above data, is $15,750 per year, or $303 per week.