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19
Hospitals were originally instituted for:—
(а) The medical and surgical relief of the
necessitous poor who are not paupers.
(b) The treatment of those particular forms of
disease or injury which require special skill or
appliances for their cure, in persons who are
unable to meet extraordinary expenses.
Most certainly it was never contemplated that
children sickening with infectious disease, or grown
persons suffering from trivial illnesses, and able to pay
ordinary medical fees, should take up the valuable time
of Hospital Physicians and Surgeons to the detriment
of the more deserving. In by-gone days the treatment
of such ailments was the peculiar province of the
private doctor, who was rightly considered a specialist
in these particular complaints, and the hospital was
only applied to in serious or prolonged illnesses ; but
since many of the hospitals have ceased to require a
governor's letter, and have converted their out-patient
departments into cheap dispensaries, this condition of
things no longer obtains; moreover as applicants pay
for their physic, they do not consider that they are in
receipt of charitable relief. The result of this is that
amongst a certain class of people, no sooner is a child,
or even a grown person taken ill, than he or she is
rushed off to the hospital, where, for the sum of three
pence, medical advice and a week's supply of medicine
can be obtained, without any inconvenient enquiries
as to the applicant's ability to pay proper fees.
The hospital "authorities are always most anxious to
shew huge numbers of out-patients cured or "relieved,"
as these figures appeal to the charitable public, and the