On slight ailments : and on treating disease / by Lionel S. Beale.
- Lionel Smith Beale
- Date:
- MDCCCXC [1890]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: On slight ailments : and on treating disease / by Lionel S. Beale. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.
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![THE PROPOSED ORGANIZATION OF OUT-PATIENTS AND PROVIDENT DISPENSARIES. A very favourite suggestion of self-constituted organizing philanthro- pists is that the number of out-patients attending hospitals should be limited. Now it must be borne in mind that a public institution gradually gets very widely known and poor patients come to it for help from very long distances, and it seems scarcely fair to tell a patient that he must come again because he is one over the number admitted for the day, and especially when the real cost of helping him is so very small. Again, among a great number of out-patients will be found some suffering from grave disease. Such by the present system are at once admitted into the wards and properly treated and nursed. To send away such cases, especially if they have come many miles, would be wrong, and it is obvious that the porter is not the proper official to be expected to take the responsibility of distinguishing the fit from the unfit. Nor is there if the work increases the least difficulty in findmg highly-qualified medical practitioners to attend the poor who come in increased numbers to the out-patient departments of hospitals. The staff can always be increased, and the increase is to the public advantage by the larger experience afforded to an increasing number of medical officers and by the prompt action taken in getting poor working people well as quickly as possible. Moreover, in case of the occurrence of any serious epidemic, we have the means and machinery of combating it ready, in thorough working order, available at any moment, and capable of immediate expansion and at excessively small cost to the community. No matter how bad the times might be our present medical charities are fully competent and, with a little temporary addi- tional help, ready organized for almost any amount of work. Several of our hospitals in a week could be arranged to receive twice the ordinary number of patients, and considerable increase of funds would be immediately supplied by the committee and friends of each institu- tion. Instead of this some would set in work the cumbrous and slowly- res]Donding machinery of municipal or imperial taxation, possibly at a time when all classes were overtaxed and an expensive foreign war on our hands. In short, on all grounds it is better to leave these expenses to be provided as heretofore by the highly successful and practically unobjectionable voluntary system. Surely it is better to continue to utilize well-known and long-established institutions, which form centres of medical assistance conveniently placed here and there amongst our increasing millions, than to trust to the chances of establishing new ones equally good, and rearranging all upon new principles of cen-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2130340x_0072.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
