Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

There were two wards, one for men, the other for women, each with forty beds, under the charge of three nurses, two for the day and one for the night work. They were great, powerful, red-faced women, who all ate a great deal of beef and drank a great deal of beer, and lifted the patients as you would lift puppy dogs.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Abbreviations:

• ER: East Riding
• GM: Greater Manchester
• NR: North Riding
• NY: North Yorkshire
• SY: South Yorkshire
• WR: West Riding
• WY: West Yorkshire

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Original

At the Annual General Meeting of the Leeds House of Recovery on November 28, 1861, Allbutt was elected physician to the institution, his senior colleague being Dr. Charles Chadwick. This, in spite of a name rather suggesting a convalescent home, was one of the early fever hospitals to be established in this country, and diseases such as typhus and relapsing fever, now almost never seen, were then commonly admitted into its wards; at this time it was at Burmantofts, in the outskirts of Leeds, but in 1885 it ceased to be a charity and was taken over by the Leeds Corporation, being now at Seacroft. When opening a Home for nurses at Dewsbury on October 19, 1909, he described the nursing and nurses of more than forty years before at the Leeds House of Recovery; there were two wards, one for men, the other for women, each with forty beds, under the charge of three nurses, two for the day and one for the night work. “They were great, powerful, red-faced women, who all ate a great deal of beef and drank a great deal of beer, and lifted the patients as you would lift puppy dogs.”

194 words.

Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• Allbutt, Clifford (1836-1925) (22), Dewsbury-born physician (Leeds Infirmary 1861-89), inventor of the clinical thermometer, Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge 1892-his death ·
• Beef (3) ·
• Beer (34) ·
• Burmantofts (3) ·
• 📌Dewsbury (21) ·
• Leeds House of Recovery (3) ·
• 📌Leeds (235) ·
• Nursing (2) ·
• Physical strength (1) ·
• Relapsing fever (1) ·
• Typhoid fever (5) ·

All tags.

Similar

• 15 April 1924: Writing to The Lancet, Clifford Allbutt tells how a nursing hack eliminated (typhoid) thromboses in the Leeds fever hospital in the 1860s
• 13 April 1915: During the wartime Serbian typhus epidemic, Clifford Allbutt recalls the open-air treatment he used in the 1865-66 outbreak in Leeds
• 16 February 1886: Clifford Allbutt explains to James Crichton-Browne why three years later he was to trade a lucrative medical consulting career in Leeds for a less well paid Commissionership in Lunacy in London
• 13 August 1877: For want of a bathroom, T. Clifford Allbutt almost loses a feverish patient
• 23 January 1888: Dr Henry Arthur Allbutt of Leeds launches a crowdfunder against being struck off for the affordability of his obstetrics and gynaecology manual for women
• 16 February 1909: Clifford Allbutt, supporting George Bernard Shaw’s proposal that medicine be socialised, gives a Yorkshire example of a physician drawn by vocation, not money
• 14 September 1868: Clifford Allbutt welcomes George Eliot to his house and new hospital in Leeds
• 8 January 1925: Writing to Berkeley Moynihan, Clifford Allbutt recalls surgery at Leeds Infirmary in the 1860s
• 27 April 1924: In a letter to Edmund Gosse, Clifford Allbutt recalls the Brontës
• 18 August 1889: Eight survivors of prostate surgery present themselves to a meeting of the BMA in Leeds