Coloured cartoon from the Northern Looking Glass 17 September 1825, the ninth in the series "Essay on Modern Medical Education". Under the title "Practical Results: At Home" it shows a ward in which a skeleton doctor tours a hospital ward, in which skeleton nurses are tending the mortally ill.
The cartoonist is probably referring to the horrific conditions in the fever wards at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary during one of the many typhus and other fever epidemics of the 1820s. Mortality rates were high among patients and staff alike, and the high death rates and severe overcrowding in the wards persuaded the governors of the hospital to build an extension to the hospital in which fever cases could be treated apart from other patients. The new fever hospital opened in 1829.
Reference: Sp Coll Bh14-x.8
Glasgow University Library, Special Collections
Keywords:
doctors, fever epidemics, fever hospitals, fever patients, fever wards, Glasgow Looking Glass, Glasgow Royal Infirmary, hospital wards, hospitals, infirmaries, lithographs, Northern Looking Glass, nurses, physicians, skeletons, typhus
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