Homoeopathic hospital statistics / by W.T. Gairdner.

Date:
[1852]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Homoeopathic hospital statistics / by W.T. Gairdner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    avoided the temptations to “ make things pleasant” by applying the most formidable names in the nosology to comparatively slight diseases. Let us admit that the deaths, admissions, etc., are correctly stated as to numbers; that every patient recorded as cured went forth rejoicing into society without a trace of his disorder remaining; and, in short, that the whole statement is constructed as if it had never occurred to Dr. Fleischmann and his coadjutors, any more than to an ordinary hospital physician, that the sta- bility of his system depended upon the results he could show to the public and to his government; after all these admis- sions, what is the real scientific result of the homoeopathic statistics ? I do not hesitate to declare it to be my belief, after careful consideration of the subject, that the ratio of mortality, under the circumstances narrated, is enormously high. To prove my position, let me request your readers to follow me into a few details, which I venture to promise will be found easy to follow and to apply, and consequently equally easy, if erroneously applied, to confute. The statistical homoeopaths are clamorous in their deiifands for a comparison between the results of homoeo- pathic and what they insultingly nickname allopathic hos- pitals. They point triumphantly to the contrast between Dr. Fleischmann’s Hospital, at Vienna, conducted on their principles, and the general hospital of the same city, in which the ordinary treatment of disease, diversified to some extent by Dr. Skoda’s do-nothing system, is supreme. The disingenuousness of this comparison is of a piece with that of the appeal to public ignorance against the conclusions of science to which I have alluded in a former part of this communication. Every one familiar with the routine of hospitals knows well, that a large, well-known, and accessi- ble institution, such as the recognised general hospital of a metropolis, will inevitably attract into its wards the most desperate, the most poverty-stricken, the most abandoned and forlorn cases to be found within its range, and will, by the very fact of withdrawing these, tend to improve the mortality-list of other smaller and less central institutions. The Hotel Dieu at Paris, the Santo Spirito at Rome, Guy’s, and others in London, attain in this way a high ratio of mortality, simply by the fact, that these are