Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Houses of Death

From the Chirurgeon's Apprentice:
 Today, we think of the hospital as an exemplar of sanitation. However, during the first half of the nineteenth century, hospitals were anything but hygienic. They were breeding grounds for infection and provided only the most primitive facilities for the sick and dying, many of whom were housed on wards with little ventilation or access to clean water. As a result of this squalor, hospitals became known as “Houses of Death.”

 The best that can be said about Victorian hospitals is that they were a slight improvement over their Georgian predecessors. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement when one considers that a hospital’s “Chief Bug-Catcher”—whose job it was to rid the mattresses of lice—was paid more than its surgeons in the eighteenth century. In fact, bed bugs were so common that the “Bug Destroyer” Andrew Cooke claimed to have cleared upwards of 20,000 beds of insects during the course of his career.[1] (Read more.)
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