Patients have families / Henry B. Richardson.

  • Henry B. Richardson
Date:
1945
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Patients have families / Henry B. Richardson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    patient has a family. The doctors do not go quite so far as this ad mission would imply; they think not so much of families as of relatives of patients and how they affect the sick. It is the patient and not the family who becomes ill; it was John who got pneumonia and Fred who had that accident to his hand in the factory. In a busy service there is no time to consider that John's pneumonia fol lowed a week of cold in the head; too bad he had to go on changing tires in a snowstorm, but what else could he do in a new job? Maybe Fred wouldn't have had the accident if he hadn't been thinking about aggravation at home. The doctor in the wards has all he can do to meet the urgent problems of the repair of the human machine without concerning himself with the intricate problems of keeping it in running order. The human machine continues, how ever, to function, and not as an individual unit but geared to other machines which are more or less similar. One of them is Mrs. Martin Q—. A tour of the hospital during visiting hours thus shows us rela tives of patients, rather than families. Little could be expected, how ever, of a search for the family in person, for the obvious reason that the stay in the hospital is an interruption of the family Ufe. It would be fairer, as well as more rational, to conduct the inquiry by means of the written records. For this purpose we can select a family at random and follow its fortunes as a family in its contacts with the out-patient department of the hospital. THE FAMILY AS SEEN IN THE RECORDS catherine Mrs. Q— might have been seen on a May morning on her way to the hospital with her younger daughter, Catherine, whose slim- ness contrasts with her own short, dumpy figure. Occasionally she brushes back a straggling wisp of hair from her eyes. Mrs. Martin Q— is no stranger to hospitals, but this is nothing like the one to which she had taken her first-born daughter Laura to consult the eminent specialist on heart disease. Mrs. Q— is familiar with illness. She, too, knows the long line of waiting visitors, and before Laura