Today’s Overcrowded, Grimy Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Here’s an excerpt from “The Butchering Art” about groundbreaking Victorian surgeon Joseph Lister (for whom “Listerine” is named):
After the first year of medical school, Lister began his residency at University College Hospital in October 1850. Several months later, the medical committee offered him the position of surgical dresser to John Eric Erichsen, the hospital’s senior surgeon. Lister accepted.
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.
Admittedly, a number of London hospitals in the first half of the nineteenth century were rebuilt or extended in line with the demands placed upon them by the city’s growing population. For instance, St. Thomas’ Hospital received a new anatomical theater and museum in 1813; and St. Bartholomew’s Hospital underwent several structural improvements between 1822 and 1854, which increased the number of patients it could receive. Three teaching hospitals were also built during this time, including University College Hospital in 1834.
Despite these changes—or because these enlargements suddenly brought hundreds of patients into proximity with one another—hospitals were known by the public as “Houses of Death.” Some only admitted patients who brought with them money to cover their almost inevitable burial. Others, like St. Thomas’, charged double if the person in question was deemed “foul” by the admissions officer. The surgeon James Y. Simpson remarked as late as 1869 that a “soldier has more chance of survival on the field of Waterloo than a man who goes into hospital.”
In spite of token efforts to make hospitals cleaner, most remained overcrowded, grimy, and poorly managed. They were breeding grounds for infection and provided only the most primitive facilities for the sick and the dying, many of whom were housed on wards with little ventilation or access to clean water. Surgical incisions made in large city hospitals were so vulnerable to infection that operations were restricted to only the most urgent cases. The sick often languished in filth for long periods before they received medical attention, because most hospitals were disastrously understaffed. In 1825, visitors to St. George’s Hospital discovered mushrooms and maggots thriving in the damp, dirty sheets of a patient recovering from a compound fracture. The afflicted man, believing this to be the norm, had not complained about the conditions, nor had any of his fellow ward mates thought the squalor especially noteworthy.
Florence Nightingale visiting a Victorian hospital
Worst of all was the fact that hospitals constantly reeked of piss, shit, and vomit. A sickening odor permeated every surgical ward. The smell was so offensive that doctors sometimes walked around with handkerchiefs pressed to their noses. It was this affront to the senses that most tested surgical students on their first day in the hospital.
Berkely Moynihan—one of the first surgeons in England to use rubber gloves—recalled how he and his colleagues used to throw off their own jackets when entering the operating theater and don an ancient frock that was often stiff with dried blood and pus. It had belonged to a retired member of staff and was worn as a badge of honor by his proud successors, as were many items of surgical clothing.
Pregnant women who suffered vaginal tears during delivery were especially at risk in these dangerous environments because these wounds provided welcome openings for the bacteria that doctors and surgeons carried on them wherever they went. In England and Wales in the 1840s, approximately 3,000 mothers died each year from bacterial infections such as puerperal fever (also known as childbed fever). This amounted to roughly 1 death for every 210 confinements. Many women also died from pelvis abscesses, hemorrhaging, or peritonitis—the latter being a terrible condition in which bacteria travel through the bloodstream and inflame the peritoneum, the lining of the abdomen.
Because surgeons saw suffering on a daily basis, very few felt any need to address an issue that they saw as inevitable and commonplace. Most surgeons were interested in the individual bodies of their patients, not hospital populations and statistics. They were largely unconcerned with the causes of diseases, focusing instead on diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. Lister, however, would soon form his own opinion about the parlous state of hospital wards and about what could be done to address what he saw as a growing humanitarian crisis.
Culled from: The Butchering Art
Wyoming Territorial Prisoner Du Jour!
The Wyoming Territorial Prison is a former federal government prison near Laramie, Wyoming. Built in 1872, it is one of the oldest buildings in Wyoming. It operated as a federal penitentiary from 1872 to 1890, and as a state prison from 1890 to 1901.
Today we feature prisoner #58, from the Warden’s record book:
#58 Michael O’Brien (real name, John Reddy) – December 12, 1875 – Grand Larceny – Laramie County – 7 years – age 27 – Bartender – Ireland and London, England. Conduct was indifferent and quarrelsome. Remarks: Convict’s second time in the penitentiary, having served a term in 1874, Convict #30 (Assault with intent to kill)/99***-. Taken to Nebraska State Prison on June 24, 1878, Wyoming Convict #15. Comments: Convict was involved in a fight on June 14, 1879, with another Wyoming prisoner #66, Thomas Smith in the stone quarry at Lincoln Prison and was shot by a guard, seriously wounded, but finally recovered. Convict served full time and was released on December 10, 1882.
Michael O’Brien – He just ain’t no good!
Culled from: Atlas of Wyoming Outlaws at the Territorial Penitentiary