The hospital future of greater New York : address delivered at the Fifty-Third Annual Meeting of the Woman's Hospital in the State of New York, Wednesday, December 23, 1908 / by W. Gilman Thompson.
- William Gilman Thompson
- Date:
- 1908
Licence: In copyright
Credit: The hospital future of greater New York : address delivered at the Fifty-Third Annual Meeting of the Woman's Hospital in the State of New York, Wednesday, December 23, 1908 / by W. Gilman Thompson. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
10/13 page 10
![jected to a uniform, unvarying temperature, regardless of the fact that some need wide open windows or balcony treatment, while others need hot-air baths, or packs, or poultices. The convalescents have nowhere to go for rest and change, and who ever saw a space in a city hospital for them to exercise? There are those so bold as to suggest that we are getting the “hos- pital habit.” The well-to-do no longer have homes but “apartments”; they have no room for illness and no room for nurses, so they enter hospitals in increasing number. Their example tends to attract the poor, who think that, after all, hospitals are not so bad when they read in the morning paper that “Mr. X, the well-known financier, has just had his appendix removed,” or “his pneumonia treated at some famous hospital.” The poor, moreover, are being “rounded up” and sent to hospitals by the district nurses. They enter hospitals in nearly dou- ble the ratio to the total population in which they did two decades ago. During the fifteen years from 1890 to 1905, the ratio of the poor who were treated in general hospitals increased 85%, whereas the general population increase for the same period was only 64%. This ratio of increase will doubtless soon reach its maximum, but it has not yet done so. In Paris, on the other hand, one third of the total an- nual municipal expenditure for the sick poor is devoted to caring for them in their own homes by a paid staff of physicians. It might be difficult to inaugurate such a system here, if not unconstitutional, but if we are not careful, we can easily overdo the extent of our hospital treatment. There are some humanitarian advantages in remaining at home when ill, where the family may assume some share of care and responsibility, provided, of course, that there is a home and a family. We owe a great debt to tuberculosis for what it lias done for the treat- ment of other diseases. It has taught that fresh air is not a specific for that disease alone, but merely increases resisting power against the inroads of any serious disease, hence the open air treatment of pneumonia, anemia, blood poisoning, and many other desperate con- ditions which is everywhere yielding such remarkable results. It has completely reconstructed our ideas of hospital architecture, demand- ing accessible balconies opening from every ward, and flat roofs for exercise, recreation, and fresh air. It has abolished that most per- nicious system known as “forced ventilation” (so called) at fixed tem- peratures, which, while it supports life, has nothing uplifting in its influence on those whose breathing and blood and circulation need the stimulus that we all feel in health when we step into the pure fresh [10]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22431846_0012.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
