Homœopathic hospital statistics / by W.T. Gairdner.

  • William Tennant Gairdner
Date:
[1852]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Homœopathic hospital statistics / by W.T. Gairdner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the popular hospitals of their respective districts. In¬ deed, their influence is often felt in this respect far beyond the limits of the town in which they are placed. There is not a shadow of a doubt that the principal hospitals of London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Edinburgh, and Glasgow absorb, so to speak, a large portion of the mortality of multitudes of provincial hospitals all over this kingdom. Compare, for instance, the average mortality of thirty provincial hospitals in England (4*46) with that of fourteen taken indiscriminately from London and some of the considerable towns (7*79). (a) The difference here, though nearly 75 per cent., is not by any means so great as might legitimately be shown, as many of the towns enume¬ rated in the second list are, to some extent, under the pro¬ tective influence of still more populous communities and more frequented hospitals. Thus, Addenbrooke Hospital, Cambridge, has a mortality of 2’4 per cent.; Canterbury, 2*0 ; Exeter, 3‘2, &c. ; while the great hospitals of London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, vary between 5 and 12 per cent, of ordinary mortality. If I were to give a formula for the arrangements of an hospital designed to exhibit a low rate of mortality, it would be this: Choose your site well; let it be not in, but near, a large city having already hospital accommodation on a prodigious scale, well known to the poorest classes of the community, and adapted to their wants ; let the distance from the centre be such (say three miles) as will keep back the extremely abject and the dangerously diseased, either through want of knowledge of your institution, or want of power to reach it; let the arrangements be so perfect as to contrast favourably with the older hospitals, and to attract the valetudinarians, whose illnesses and means permit them to avail themselves of its superior accommodation ; and, finally, let some special practice be pursued, in order to enlist the sympathies of rich or idle dilettanti, who will know how to fill your wards with the sort of cases suitable for your experiment. This is precisely the picture of the Vienna Homoeopathic Hospital, which has the amazing- effrontery to call upon us to compare its peddling experi- (a) Statistics of Civil Hospitals, by J. Thomson, Esq., Medical and Surgical Journal, 1843, Vol LX. The succeeding calculations in this para¬ graph are from the same paper.