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the tumours. But the surgical ward is indeed a chamber of horrors. Situated on the ground floor of the building to the right, on entering, it has at the back the wall of an adjoining shop, which cuts off all light and ventilation, while both ends of the verandah are piled up with furniture, the interstices being utilised as the sleeping places of the attendants, and their dirty clothes or half-washed changes are there hung to dry or air. Inside this ward is to be found every class of wound or fracture. Innumerable sores, festering and suppurating, emitting the foulest odours, are treated only with pitch plaster, seldom washed, the idea of antiseptics and clean bandages being, apparently, utterly foreign to the institution. The walk through the two rooms forming this ward was enough to sicken almost anybody. These rooms are little better than pest houses, where gangrene and other horrors are far too much in evidence.
In the middle of the smaller and less ventilated of these two rooms is a case that should not be tolerated a day long. This is a man with a fractured thigh. Instead of the bone being put into place and bound up in splints, so that the fracture can heal, he is sitting up, with the broken leg in a wooden trough, and with nothing but a flexible leather band on his thigh, jastened above the knee and at the top of the thigh by leather and cotton straps! Absolutely no effort is made to keep the bone in position, the man in his sitting position continually moving the leg and the loose ends of the bone, and so preventing that junction which Nature, if given the least chance, would speedily effect. As a result the thigh is numb and soft, the knee joint is badly swollen, the shin is flabby and wearing away, and the man is in a fair way to linger in agony until blood-poisoning sets in and he dies! Unless this man be at once treated by a foreign surgeon in which case his cure and discharge in full health and vigour will be only matter of weeks-he will surely suffer the most agonising of deaths in the near future. This is an urgent case, and should be at once attended to.
By order of the Government, the Hospital has to be visited daily by one of the Government physicians, who is supposed to have the superintendence and general supervision of the Hospital. As a matter of fact, he has absolutely no power except to make suggestions, which are not carried out unless the Committee feel inclined to do So. With the exception of insane. persons, he has no power to send any one to the Civil Hospital. The patients may be asked or recommended to go to the Hospital, but unless they wish it they cannot be taken there. Last year, with a different Committee, a large number of patients did go to the Civil Hospital, and as a consequence a larger ward had to be put aside for their treatment. But this year only twenty-nine patients have so far gone there, a fact which should be duly considered.
THE TREATMENT OF LUNATICS IN HONGKONG.
Intimately connected with the present condition of the Tung Wa Hospital, and forming another proof of the absolute necessity for immediate interference in the treatment of patients, is the treatment of lunatics in the Colony. In the columns of the Hongkong Telegraph on the 31st July, 1894, one of the staff of this journal thus described the state of affairs then existing in the Tung Wa Hospital, which he termed "a stain on our boasted civilization" and a "chamber of horrors" :—
"The doors thrown wide open, a horrible sight presented itself to the spectator: caged within thick hardwood bars, like ferocious wild animals in a menagerie, sat half-a-dozen alleged lunatics, four males and two adult females. All of them appeared perfectly harmless, especially the unfortunate women, one of whom was completely nude and amusing herself with the remnants of a thirty-cent blanket, the edge of which she imagined she was hemming. There this poor emaciated creature sat close to the rails of her den, perfectly willing to carry on a conversation with our reporter as he stood amazed at what he saw in a cage exactly opposite and in full view of the woman referred to.
This contained a man who had been some time in confinement. He was dressed in filthy rags and had in front of him a tiu pan full of very second-rate boiled