whom must be placed
that of Dr. Ash, the first physician to the institution, and to whom
much of the honour of its establishment belongs. The connection of the
General Hospital with the Triennial Musical Festivals, which, for a
hundred years, have been held for its benefit, has, doubtless, gone far
towards the support of the Charity, very nearly L112,000 having been
received from that source altogether, and the periodical collections on
Hospital Sundays and Saturdays, have still further aided thereto, but it
is to the contributions of the public at large that the governors of the
institution are principally indebted for their ways and means. For the
first twenty-five years, the number of in-patients were largely in
excess of the out-door patients, there being, during that period, 16,588
of the former under treatment, to 13,009 of the latter. Down to 1861,
rather more than half-a-million cases of accident, illness, &c., had
been attended to, and to show the yearly increasing demand made upon the
funds of the Hospital, it is only necessary to give a few later dates.
In 1860 the in-patients numbered 2,850, the out-patients 20,584, and the
expenditure was L4,191. In 1876, the total number of patients were
24,082, and the expenditure L12,207. The next three years showed an
average of 28,007 patients, and a yearly expenditure of L13,900. During
the last four years, the benefits of the Charity have been bestowed upon
an even more rapidly-increasing scale, the number of cases in 1880
having been 30,785, in 1881 36,803, in 1882 44,623, and in 1883 41,551,
the annual outlay now required being considerably over L20,000 per year.
When the centenary of the Hospital was celebrated in 1879, a suggestion
was made that an event so interesting in the history of the charity
would be most fittingly commemorated by the establishment or a Suburban
Hospital, where patients whose diseases are of a chronic character could
be treated with advantage to themselves, and with relief to the parent
institution, which is always so pressed for room that many patients have
to be sent out earlier than the medical officers like. The proposal was
warmly taken up, but no feasible way of carrying it out occurred until
October, 1883, when the committee of the Hospital had the pleasure of
receiving a letter (dated Sept. 20), from Mr. John Jaffray, in which he
stated that, having long felt the importance of having a Suburban
Hospital, and with a desire to do some