AT. CHARING CROSS HOSPITAL
Of course they are not large enough. Double the space would hardly accommodate the patients who flock to them. While the writer stood there, a patient was being treated in each, and an old, old woman was wheeled in on a stretcher, moaning. Directly these urgent cases are dealt with, -they are evacuated to make room for others, and sent upstairs to the various wards. The children's ward is a garden of delight, full of toys and flowers and engaging little people standing up in their cots and eyeing the visitor in the expectancy of amusement. To be a nurse here must be a change from the care of peevish adults. Yet there are also sights to rend the heart : two month-old babies for instance— one a Mongolian idiot, the other, poor maimed little thing, with a bandaged head, crying perpetually to the widest stretch of its toothless mouth. Again there was Ernest, whose face had swollen to a balloon. He was being X-rayed, and lay still and patient, like a good soldier, but one saw how his sand-shoes twitched. . . .
The Maternity Ward has fifteen or twenty cases always in its care, cases sent from all over London, owing to some complication or uncertainty, to be cared for by the cleverest gynaecologists. At the foot of each bed is a tiny cradle, sometimes empty and expectant, or empty and sad, but more often a crown of happiness.
One hospital is much like another : the same wards, the same sinister white operating rooms with mirror-circled searchlights and ugly-looking cases of instruments, the same spruce sisters and va-et-vient of activity. But it was visitors' day at the Charing Cross Hospital and one could not help feeling how bound up it all is with the intimate life of London. Every one of these good people seeing their friends and relatives in their time of adversity had cause to be profoundly grateful to the institution. The truth is we should all be• profoundly grateful. The Charing Cross Hospital is one of the best administered institutions in London, and it is vitally necessary that it should be just where it is. Other hospitals owning valuable sites may possibly have to move into the country, but the Charing Cross Hospital could not possibly do so, if only because of its care of casualties.
The Royal Westminster Ophthalmic Hospital, next door, has recently come on the market. It is intended to buy and develop this site at the cost of £100,000, so as to provide proper accommodation for dealing with accidents and other cases. This is a great and good cause in which we hope our readers will interest themselves far beyond the Metropolitan area. London is our city through- out the Empire, and if readers from far and near will give something, even in these hard times, they will have the satisfaction of feeling that they are contributing to a place whose services, in the changes and chances of life and London traffic, they may themselves unhappily require with instant need.
A tithe of the sum spent monthly on food and pleasure within a mile of the Hospital would buy, develop and richly endow this site. We shall be happy to forward any contributions from our readers, or they may be sent direct to the Secretary of the Charing Cross Hospital.
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