Remarks on the report of Her Majesty's Commissioners on the Poor-Laws of Scotland, presented to Parliament in 1844, and on the dissent of Mr. Twisleton from that report / by William Pulteney Alison.

  • Alison, William Pulteney, 1790-1859.
Date:
1844
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Remarks on the report of Her Majesty's Commissioners on the Poor-Laws of Scotland, presented to Parliament in 1844, and on the dissent of Mr. Twisleton from that report / by William Pulteney Alison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    pire at the age of puberty, no such complaint can be made, and crime, owing to destitution, is comparatively rare.—See my own Evidence, on the authority of Sir Charles Shaw, swpm; and the Evidence of P. Hill, Esq., infra. IV. The next topic to which I wish to direct parti- cular attention is, the state of Medical Relief for the poor in Scotland, as to which I shall take the liberty of quoting a portion of my own evidence before the Commissioners. The medical aid to the poor I believe to be generally very deficient; and where it is sufficient for them, it is a heavy and unjust burden on the medical men, who devote often, I believe, a larger portion of their time and money to the service of the poor than any other class in the community. I remember a very excellent man, a practitioner in the Grassmarket here, who told me that he had sometimes given away in a day, among the poor in the Grassmarket, more than he had earned on that day. In most towns there are dispensaries, by which medical men are relieved of great part of the expense of medicines for the sick poor, and in some of them, I believe, the duty of visiting the sick poor is very carefully performed; but being always on the *' voluntary principle, there is no security for its being regularly or uniformly performed,—for the persons employed to visit being regularly instructed,—or for that early attention to cases, on which the success of treatment, in most cases admitting of successful treatment, depends. For example, in Edinburgh, for thirty years before 1815 there was a public dispensary; but it was opened only twice a-week, and it was no part of the duty of the medical officers to attend the sick poor at home. Any other medical aid which the sick poor had at home was private charity on the part of the medical men. Since then the duty of attending the sick poor at home has been undertaken by several dispensaries ; but the assistance given in this way is not so regular nor effectual as it ought to be. During the present epidemic, many of the young men, students, on whom the duty of visiting chiefly devolves, have been deterred from attending