Two large and well-conducted Convalescent Homes were part of the plan--one situated at Hastings, and the other at Godalming; and these contributed at least as much as the hospital itself to the improved health of the parish.
Now it was objected by those who were not friendly to this place that medical knowledge could never be advanced by such a system, and would stagnate and die, if all hospitals were conducted so selfishly. It was answered that medical science could scarcely be in worse plight than it already was, after all its great opportunities and hecatombs of murdered victims, as admitted by the most eminent medical writers.
No objector to the methods of treatment in our great general hospitals could express himself with more force than Sir Astley Cooper, lecturing to the students of Guy's Hospital, when he said: "Look, gentlemen, at one hundred patients who come into the hospital. What is the miserable treatment of these patients? You are aware that I scarcely ever enter these wards (the medical wards) of the hospital. I will tell you why I do not enter them. I abstain from entering them because patients are compelled to undergo so infamous a system of treatment that I cannot bear to witness it.... No consideration shall induce me to repress my feelings, and I do say that the present treatment of patients is infamous and disgraceful, for their health is irremediably destroyed." On another occasion this great surgeon said: "The art of medicine is founded on conjecture and improved by murder."
Nightingale Hospital could not do worse than this anyway!
There's a real love of a lie, Liars find ready-made for lies they make, As hand for glove, or tongue for sugar-plum. --_Browning._
In nothing have hospitals improved more of late years than in their nursing arrangements. This seems coincident with the High Church movement which has given the sick poor the inestimable boon of being nursed by gentlewomen who have adopted the noble profession of nursing from the love of God and their neighbour--ousting the Gamp and Harris sisterhood to the great advantage of their patients. Previous to the reform of this branch of charity, great scandals were always arising from the ignorance, incompetence, indolence, and drunkenness of the women employed to attend upon the sick. Very often, too, the poor invalids were robbed by these persons; and when their little possessions were not actually filched, it was necessary to bribe their attendants to do their duty, or to omit it, as the case might be. Many blots on the management of St. Bernard's were traced to this source by the governing body; and when Miss Rackworth, the matron, died, it was determined to thoroughly reorganize the nursing staff on the new system, which had been proved successful in other hospitals.