H ouse and Garden 
and with the power station and kitchen in the 
basement. Behind this, at the north corner 
of the site, is the building containing lodg¬ 
ings for male help. 
The administration building forms the 
cross of the “ H ” of which the above 
groups are the legs. It contains the usual 
administrative offices in the lower storeys. 
In the upper storeys are the rooms for the 
medical staff', with a gymnasium in the dome. 
The two pavilions projecting from the ad¬ 
ministration building to the southeast contain 
medical and surgical wards. The corre¬ 
sponding pavilions on the opposite face con¬ 
tain, each, a chapel in the first storey, and 
wards for detention cases above. 
The wards contain twenty-four beds each, 
with iio square feet and 1,450 cubic feet 
per bed. There are balconies or loggias at¬ 
tached to each ward for solariums. In addi¬ 
tion, the fiat roof will be used as a roof- 
garden. The toilet-rooms, contrary to 
general theory, but agreeing with general 
practice, are in the ward-buildings instead of 
being in isolated pavilions or towers. The 
exterior is to be of Harvard brick, with cor¬ 
nices, etc., of stone, and with the dome of 
copper. 
The heating and ventilating system will 
be plenum-vacuum, the air being forced 
through heaters at the bottom of the supply- 
ducts and exhausted by fans in the roof. 
The kitchen service will be by means of an 
electric road in the basement, delivering to 
the dumb-waiters and elevators in the vari¬ 
ous buildings. The ambulance stables are 
under the medical operating-room on Twenty- 
eighth street. 
The total capacity of the new hospital 
will be 2,800 beds for patients. With doc¬ 
tors, nurses and servants, the number of in¬ 
mates will be between 4,000 and 5,000. 
'The largest modern hospital is the Royal 
and Imperial at Vienna, with 2,000 beds. 
Next to it are the Civic at Strasburg, the 
Eppendorf and the General at Hamburg, 
with about 1,600 beds each. A few other 
German and Austrian hospitals have be¬ 
tween 800 and r,ooo beds. 'The English, 
French and American hospitals generally 
have under 800 beds, and the great majority 
of large hospitals have less than 600 beds. 
We must go back several centuries to find a 
hospital equal to Bellevue in size. The 
Hotel-Dieu at Paris contained, about the 
fourteenth century, 3,600 patients, probably 
several to a bed. The great hospital of 
Milan, of the fourteenth century, had 3,000 
beds. 
The great difference between the propor¬ 
tion of the area of the site to beds here and 
in the European hospitals indicates a type 
of hospital that has been developed chiefly 
in American cities. Here, there is one bed 
to 200 square feet of site. The smallest 
proportion in Europe is 365 square feet per 
bed. 1 'That is an exception, for the Conti¬ 
nental hospitals have generally more than 
1,400 square feet per bed ; the English hos¬ 
pitals somewhat less. But in New York 
Hospital, properly a single pavilion, and in 
St. Luke’s, New York, consisting of a num¬ 
ber of pavilions, the proportion is approxi¬ 
mately the same as in Bellevue. 'The result, 
obviously, in order to avoid covering the 
entire site with wards, must be the abandon¬ 
ment of low pavilions, and the adoption of 
a system of superposed wards. Within lim¬ 
its, and when the horizontal distance between 
the wards is sufficient, there seems to be no 
inherent objection to such a system, except 
that dependence must be placed on arti¬ 
ficial ventilation. It is unfortunate that the 
restriction of area should be greatest in cities, 
where large hospitals are most necessary, and 
where the surroundings are the most unfavor¬ 
able. 'The high cost of land is the first, and 
not an especially good, reason for it. 'The 
objection to interrupting the continuity of a 
city is a better one. But in London, at St. 
Thomas’ Hospital, which has four storeys of 
wards, and which is in a situation very sim¬ 
ilar to Bellevue, having the river on the one 
side and the city on the others, they have 
managed to obtain land enough to give 665 
feet per bed. Arthur Dillon. 
1 The figures given are chiefly from Burdette, from Toilet, and, 
at second-hand, from Moualt & Snell. 
2 99 
