124 EFFECTS OF THE ANTISEPTIC TREATMENT 



building nearest to the ground/ including my male accident ward, which was 

 one of those on the ground-floor ; while my female ward was on the floor im- 

 mediately above. For several years I had the opportunity of making an observa- 

 tion of considerable, though melancholy, interest — viz. that in my accident 

 ward, when all or nearly all the beds contained patients with open sores, the 

 diseases which result from hospital atmosphere were sure to be present in an 

 aggravated form ; whereas, when a large proportion of the cases had no external 

 wound, the evils in question were greatly mitigated or entirely absent. This 

 appeared striking evidence that the emanations from foul discharges, as dis- 

 tinguished from the mere congregation of several human beings in the same 

 apartment, constitute the great source of mischief in a surgical hospital. Hence 

 I came to regard simple fractures, though almost destitute of professional 

 interest to myself and of little value for clinical instruction, as the greatest 

 blessings ; because, having no external wound, they diminished the proportion of 

 contaminating cases. At this period I was engaged in a perpetual contest with 

 the managing body, who, anxious to provide hospital accommodation for the 

 increasing population of Glasgow, for which the infirmary was by no means 

 adequate, were disposed to introduce additional beds beyond those contem- 

 plated in the original construction. It is, I believe, fairly attributable to the 

 firmness of my resistance in this matter that, though my patients suffered from 

 the evils alluded to in a way that was sickening and often heartrending, so as 

 to make me sometimes feel it a questionable privilege to be connected with the 

 institution, yet none of my wards ever assumed the frightful condition which 

 sometimes showed itself in other parts of the building, making it necessary to 

 shut them up entirely for a time. A crisis of this kind occurred rather more 

 than two years ago in the other male accident ward on the ground-floor, separated 

 from mine merely by a passage twelve feet broad ; where the mortality became 

 so excessive as to lead, not only to closing the ward, but to an investigation into 

 the cause of the evil, which was presumed to be some foul drain. An excavation 

 made with this view disclosed a state of things which seemed to explain suffi- 

 ciently the unhealthiness that had so long remained a mystery. A few inches 

 below the surface of the ground, on a level with the floors of the two lowest 

 male accident wards, with only the basement area, four feet wide, intervening, 

 was found the uppermost tier of a multitude of coffins, which had been placed 

 there at the time of the cholera epidemic of 1849, ^^^ corpses having undergone 

 so little change in the interval that the clothes they had on at the time of their 

 hurried burial were plainly distinguishable. The wonder now was, not that 



^ Statistics collected by desire of the managers established the fact that the ground-floor wards 

 were, on the average, most liable to pyaemia, whoever might be the surgeon in charge ; and that those 

 on the floor immediately above came next in this respect. 



