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enough of the London workhouses. Strange it is that we should have heard so little of them before." (A good many people had heard much about them long before.) It then proceeded to state that workhouse reform began with the discovery of the case of a man in the Holborn Workhouse in 1864, and another, which followed quickly upon that, in the workhouse of St. Giles and St. George, Bloomsbury. The article implied that no one had suspected anything amiss in the treatment of the sick poor till these cases came to light; but the answer to this assertion will be found in the pages of the Workhouse Visiting Society's Journal, which had been issued continuously from 1859 to 1865, besides the various pamphlets which had contained similar statements. The Times itself admitted a letter on the subject of "Workhouse Nurses as long ago as the year 1858, which proved how great were the abuses in the treatment of the sick, and the consequent need of

investigation and reform. It may be said that the society should have more vigorously inculcated a knowledge of the state of things discovered by its members; but it must be remembered that the utmost caution and discretion was necessary in conducting the proceedings of this unauthorized and unofficial visitation, as the visitors were entirely in the power of the guardians, and were liable to be dismissed at any moment if complaints against the management were incautiously made known."

The article I have referred to concludes with these remarks, which embody nearly all that had for years been felt to be the true and only solution of the difficulties and evils of workhouse management: "It is proper that the sick, and even those incurably disabled,

* In 1866 one body of visitors was thus actually and summarily dismissed from a London workhouse, in consequence of the complaints of well-nigh intolerable grievances endured by the inmates having been noticed to the guardians by one of the ladies, a person of influence and position, as well as humanity.

should have some special provision made for them; for though the workhouse is rightly made uninviting to the able-bodied pauper, it is inhuman as well as impolitic to deny the weakly and suffering the means of recovery. The chief hindrance to the proper management of the sick wards seems to be the want of space, the next, the want of sufficient paid attendance.

"By the establishment of district infirmaries on such a scale as will give each patient air enough to breathe, with a doctor who knows and will attend to his business, a proper nurse, and necessary medicines, and by supporting these institutions partly out of the general fund, the legislature may guard against a repetition of the late abuses."

How far the Bill thus carefully framed and introduced has been carried out during the ten or eleven years that have elapsed, most persons who read the daily papers will be able to judge for themselves, when they find that new asylums

for the sick (and even special classes of the sick), as well as for the lunatic and imbecile, are from time to time being opened or enlarged in the metropolitan district; and with the extension and classification of the buildings has come also the improved management and supervision that was anticipated, both within and from without. An enlarged Board of Managers have been able to perceive and know their duties, and to act upon this knowledge. The height of success to which any one institution has arrived may be said to have been attained when the new infirmary at Highgate, built for the reception of the sick, in the first instance, from St. Pancras, and afterwards from the different unions of St. Giles and St. George, Bloomsbury, Westminster, and the Strand Unions, as a central sick asylum, was placed under the management of the staff of nurses from the Nightingale Fund at St. Thomas's Hospital, in the year 1870; when, from the testimony of all

who witnessed the results, we may believe that as high a state of excellence was reached as we need ever look for or expect in similar institutions. On the lamented death of the late matron, Miss Hill, the plan was, as we think unfortunately, broken through, and the connection with St. Thomas's Hospital given up. But, though a retrograde movement may now and then be made, we can hardly doubt that on the whole the progress has been great, if gradual, and that we have long since passed the stage at which what has been would again be possible.*

*We must not forget that the first and most important advance in the supervision of workhouse infirmaries was made at Liverpool, in the year 1865, when the vast establishment there was placed under the care of Agnes Jones, the devoted and admirable woman who was the first to raise the position and the work to the highest level, and in the end gave her life as a sacrifice to it. She was trained at the Nightingale Fund School, St. Thomas's Hospital, and was engaged by the Vestry of Liverpool to introduce trained nursing into the infirmary attached to their immense workhouse. Commencing with a staff of twelve trained nurses (also from the same school), and with the charge of a section only of the wards, she had succeeded, by the year 1868, when she died, in establishing trained nursing through

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