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and can be entered from the street without passing through the Hospital. This is an innovation due to Dr. ATKINSON, the mortuary formerly being in the centre of the Hospital. Here the bodies are viewed twice daily, and after the cause of death has been ascertained, the coffined bodies are taken away and buried.
There are two separate and distinct classes of wards. One class consists of large airy rooms, in which there are beds ranging from twelve to twenty in number. Attached to most of these rooms (after much pressure from Dr. ATKINSON) are bath rooms and lavatories, which are, however, very rarely used. Between each pair of beds are placed commodes of a very rough type, which are not, despite every effort made by the European physicians, kept as clean as they should be, and are kept in place regardless of the ability of the inmates to leave the wards. The sexes are kept separate, and the various classes of disease are kept apart. The tiled floors are, according to the attendants, washed once a week. but did not look as though they had been washed as stated. Taken all in all though, this class of ward, with the exceptions mentioned later, are fairly well adapted for their use. The bedding is, however, in a most disgraceful condition. On a plain pine plank bed, resting on trestles, is a straw mat, black in most cases with age, a netted quilt of cotton, not one of which was even partially clean, most of them being black with dirt, covered by a sheet but little cleaner, while a roll of straw, enclosed in dirty sheeting, forined the pillow. To say nothing of the larger forms of animal life that must find a snug refuge in this bedding, the material is certainly an ideal one for harbouring bacteria of every description, and as it is passed on from one patient to another, the consequences may more easily be imagined than described. They cannot be washed, and no attempt is made to disinfect this filthy material.
I
There is another class of ward, however, which by none of the canons of hygenic law can be called passable. These consist of double rows of brick buildings, entered by a brick paved court about eight feet wide and fifty feet long. On either side of this court is a building of the same length, about ten feet deep, and divided into five rooms by brick partitions reaching to the roof. In neither the back wall nor the partitions is there any opening, a door six feet high by three wide and a ventilator in the roof being the only means of light and ventilation. Each of these cnbicles is intended to accommodate two persons, and in many of them two persons are at present placed, though many of them are unoccupied. There are six sets of these cubicles, giving places, in case of need, for 120 persons, although at the present time some twenty only are occupied. These wards or cells the Government physicians have been trying for a long time to have reinoved and replaced by large and properly ventilated ones, which could be easily done, but this the Committee, it is said, steadfastly refuses to do.
In addition to these wards, there is the large pharmacy, where a wonderful stock of Chinese medicines is kept, and where innumerable draughts and plasters are prepared, a large cookhouse, where, under the usual Chinese chefs, the food for the patients and attendants--to say nothing of the Committee-men and their friends, to prepare whose frequent banquets it is also used--is prepared, and the large assembly-hall, which is the best portion of the premises. This completes the buildings known as the Tung Wa Hospital.
Turning now to the manner in which the patients are treated, and especially to the surgical ward, a condition of affairs that is very discreditable to this British Colony is found. In all the wards not the slightest effort is made to keep the patients, their clothing, or rooms, in the least degree clean. The body of a woman, who had died of consumption, was lying in the mortuary, black with dirt, her hair being a living mass of vermin. The stench in nearly all of the wards from the commodes was alınost overpowering, although every effort is made by the visiting physicians to have this remedied. Nowhere is a disinfectant of any description used. Here are to be seen women and children with plasters on their heads and backs for fevers, every kind of wound being covered simply with the universal pitch plaster, which merely aggravates