Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Medical charity : its abuses and how to remedy them. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.
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![for the lower classes generally, which shall be dissociated from the evils we have dwelt upon, which shall comprise difFei'ent methods worked harmoniously with each other, and adapted to the dif- ferent classes of persons needing relief, and which shall prove itself that which has long been anxiously sought for—an agency for the distribution of medical charity at once thoroughly efficient and wholly beneficent. The evils or abuses of medical charity which we have already described may be summed up as follows:— 1. That, exclusive of paupers, the number of inhabitants of this metropolis who are recipients of medical charity is upwards of 1,200,000, or 3 in every 10 of the whole population. 2. That a large portion of these recipients are not really and truly proper objects of such charity in any rational sense of that term. 3. That the rate of increase in the number of persons receiv- ing medical chai-ity during the last forty years has been astonish- ingly high—nearly five times higher, in fact, than has been the rate of increase of the general population during the same period. 4. That persons whose incomes enable them to command many luxuries are in the habit of obtaining all the medical aid they require from an hospital or dispensary. 6. That as time advances the administration of medical charity is being extended, step by step, to persons occupying successively higher positions in the social scale. 6. That the special form of pauperism consisting in the receipt of medical and surgical aid without paying for it, tends to induce general pauperism. 7. That the extensive dispensation of medical charity now pre- valent has the effect of supplementing, or, in other words, lower- ing, the wages of the working classes, and thus of benefiting their employers to a corresponding extent. 8. That the benefits thus obtained directly by the employed, and indirectly by their employers, are conferred chiefly by the members of the unpaid professional stafi's of the different medical charities—men who are confessedly among the hardest worked of the community. 9. That, owing to the enormous magnitude which medical charity has attained, the hospital waiting-rooms are excessively over-crowded, it being customary to see patients, to listen to their complaints, and to prescribe for them at the rate of about one per minute, and often much more rapidly. ] 0, That though an indefinable proportion of the recipients of medical charity are benefited by it, very much of the assistance](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22650489_0065.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
