III.  The Day’s Work

In any hospital at home or abroad there is a large amount of routine work, which must be carried on in an orderly and systematic manner, and upon the thoroughness with which this is done will largely depend the effectiveness of the hospital.  Patients must be fed and washed, beds must be made and the wards swept and tidied, wounds must be dressed and splints adjusted.  In an English hospital everything is arranged to facilitate this routine work.  Close to every ward is a sink-room with an adequate supply of hot and cold water, dinner arrives in hot tins from the kitchens as if by magic, whilst each ward has its own arrangements for preparing the smaller meals.  The beds are of a convenient height, and there is an ample supply of sheets and pillow-cases, and of dressing materials of all kinds arranged on tables which run noiselessly up and down the wards.  At home all these things are a matter of course; abroad they simply did not exist.  Four or five gas-rings represented our hot-water supply and our ward-kitchens for our 150 patients, and the dinners had to be carried up from the large kitchens in the basement.  The beds were so low as to break one’s back, and had iron sides which were always in the way; and when we came to the end of our sheets—­well, we came to the end of them, and that was all.  In every way the work was heavier and more difficult than at home, for all our patients were heavy men, and every wound was septic, and had, in many cases, to be dressed several times a day.  Everyone had to work hard, sometimes very hard; but as a rule we got through the drudgery in the morning, and in the afternoon everything was in order, and we should, I think, have compared very favourably in appearance with most hospitals at home.

But we had to meet one set of conditions which would, I think, baffle many hospitals at home.  Every now and then, without any warning, from 50 to 100, even in one case 150, wounded would be brought to our door.  There was no use in putting up a notice “House Full”; the men were wounded and they must be attended to.  In such a case our arrangement was a simple one:  all who could walk went straight upstairs, the gravest cases went straight to the theatre or waited their turn in the great hall, the others were accommodated on the ground floor.  We had a number of folding beds for emergency, and we had no rules as to overcrowding.  In the morning the authorities would clear out as many patients as we wished.  Sometimes we were hard put to it to find room for them all, but we always managed somehow, and we never refused admission to a single patient on the score of want of room.  The authorities soon discovered the capacity of the hospital for dealing with really serious cases, and as a result our beds were crowded with injuries of the gravest kind.  What appealed to us far more was the appreciation of the men themselves.  We felt that we had not worked in vain when we heard that the soldiers in the trenches begged to be taken “a l’Hopital Anglais.”