inseparable from such a neighbourhood, there they dwell. They live
in the hospital itself, and their rooms are on its first floor.
Sitting at their dinner-table, they could hear the cry of one of
the children in pain. The lady’s piano, drawing-materials, books,
and other such evidences of refinement are as much a part of the
rough place as the iron bedsteads of the little patients. They are
put to shifts for room, like passengers on board ship. The
dispenser of medicines (attracted to them not by self-interest, but
by their own magnetism and that of their cause) sleeps in a recess
in the dining-room, and has his washing apparatus in the sideboard.
Their contented manner of making the best of the things around
them, I found so pleasantly inseparable from their usefulness!
Their pride in this partition that we put up ourselves, or in that
partition that we took down, or in that other partition that we
moved, or in the stove that was given us for the waiting-room, or
in our nightly conversion of the little consulting-room into a
smoking-room! Their admiration of the situation, if we could only
get rid of its one objectionable incident, the coal-yard at the
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back! ‘Our hospital carriage, presented by a friend, and very
useful.’ That was my presentation to a perambulator, for which a
coach-house had been discovered in a corner down-stairs, just large
enough to hold it. Coloured prints, in all stages of preparation
for being added to those already decorating the wards, were
plentiful; a charming wooden phenomenon of a bird, with an
impossible top-knot, who ducked his head when you set a counter
weight going, had been inaugurated as a public statue that very
morning; and trotting about among the beds, on familiar terms with
all the patients, was a comical mongrel dog, called Poodles. This
comical dog (quite a tonic in himself) was found characteristically
starving at the door of the institution, and was taken in and fed,
and has lived here ever since. An admirer of his mental endowments
has presented him with a collar bearing the legend, ‘Judge not
Poodles by external appearances.’ He was merrily wagging his tail
on a boy’s pillow when he made this modest appeal to me.
When this hospital was first opened, in January of the present
year, the people could not possibly conceive but that somebody paid
for the services rendered there; and were disposed to claim them as
a right, and to find fault if out of temper. They soon came to
understand the case better, and have much increased in gratitude.
The mothers of the patients avail themselves very freely of the
visiting rules; the fathers often on Sundays. There is an
unreasonable (but still, I think, touching and intelligible)
tendency in the parents to take a child away to its wretched home,
if on the point of death. One boy who had been thus carried off on
a rainy night, when in a violent state of inflammation, and who had
been afterwards brought back, had been recovered with exceeding
difficulty; but he was a jolly boy, with a specially strong
interest in his dinner, when I saw him.
Insufficient food and unwholesome living are the main causes of
disease among these small patients. So nourishment, cleanliness,
and ventilation are the main remedies. Discharged patients are
looked after, and invited to come and dine now and then; so are
certain famishing creatures who were never patients. Both the lady
and the gentleman are well acquainted, not only with the histories
of the patients and their families, but with the characters and
circumstances of great numbers of their neighbours – of these they
keep a register. It is their common experience, that people,
sinking down by inches into deeper and deeper poverty, will conceal
it, even from them, if possible, unto the very last extremity.
The nurses of this hospital are all young, – ranging, say, from
nineteen to four and twenty. They have even within these narrow
limits, what many well-endowed hospitals would not give them, a
comfortable room of their own in which to take their meals. It is