Office of the Hospital for Sick Children.

  • Great Ormond Street Hospital
Date:
1850]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Office of the Hospital for Sick Children. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    be left unanswered. It is said by some, why set in motion all the complicated and costly machinery of a new institution, instead of adopting the simpler plan of opening a ward or wards for Children in each of the existing Hospitals ? They who start this objection do not say whether they propose to accommodate the Children at the expense of adults, for whom, while the metropolitan population has more than doubled in the present century, there has been an increase of Hospital accommodation since the year 1750 of less than 500 beds. Neither, assuming the proposal to be that of adding to the Hospitals, do they stop to inquire whether there is room on the site of several of the existing Hospitals for any addition to their size, or whether the locality they occupy is in all instances such as to be most favor¬ able to the recovery of the sick and feeble child. But, supposing all of these difficulties to be overcome, it must be borne in mind that Children of opposite sexes must be placed in different wards; that those affected with contagious fevers must be secluded from the rest, and the convalescents kept apart from the sick; while for all there must be a different diet scale, different hours must be observed, and different regulations adopted from those suitable to adult patients. Let this be done, however, and it will be at once seen that the question was not one of merely opening an additional ward in a Hospital, but of appending to it a new Institution, a scheme which, how desirable soever it might be, would yet be found attended with difficulties at least as great as those likely to be met with in founding a special Hospital for Sick Children. Each point of importance has now been passed in review; and if the facts which have been stated, and the arguments which have been adduced, have satisfied you that the object is one, the success of which will advance the interests alike of science and humanity, may we entreat you to lend to it the weight of your sanction, and to
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