In 1825, visitors to St George's Hospital in London discovered mushrooms and maggots thriving in the damp, dirty sheets of a patient recovering from a compound fracture. The afflicted man, believing this to be the norm, had not complained about the conditions – and nor did any of his fellow bedmates think the squalor especially note-worthy. Those unlucky enough to be admitted to this and other hospitals of the era were inured to the horrors that resided within.
Today, we think of the hospital as an exemplar of sanitation. However, late Georgian and early Victorian hospitals were anything but hygienic. A hospital's ‘Chief Bug-Catcher' – whose job it was to rid the mattresses of lice – was paid more than its surgeons at this time. In fact, bed bugs were so common that the ‘Bug Destroyer' Andrew Cooke claimed to have cleared upwards of 20,000 beds of insects during the course of his career. Hospitals were breeding grounds for infection and provided only the most primitive facilities for the sick and dying, many of whom were housed on wards with little ventilation or access to clean water. As a result of this squalor, these places became known as ‘Houses of Death'.
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