appropriated to medical cases, in charge of
physicians: and another to accidents, and other
visible injuries and diseases entrusted to
surgeons: but each has the knot of resident
attendants we have described. The patients
in the building may at one time number only
five hundred; and at another, may amount to
nearly six hundred: but, be the number
what it may, they are arranged in companies,
controlled and attended as we have seen.

How this large sick family, with the needful
servants, are fed, and physicked, and tended,
let us spend a day in the place to see.

Our poor old acquaintance, the woman
gored by the ox, now lies in bed; and the
house-surgeon having satisfied himself of the
nature of her injuries, and applied the requisite means for her relief, re-crosses the square
to his domicile. Let us go with him to the
quadrangle, and look and inquire about us.

London, by half-past six, is but very partially
astir; and though the din of Smithfield is, we
know, close by, the hospital has an air of
stillness and repose. As we walk round, we
see outside the square, on one hand, the low
line of buildings forming the medical school,
the room for prescribing for out-patients, the
apothecaries' laboratory and shop, the lecture
theatre, the dissecting-rooms, the library, the
museum, the dead-house (which through the
year has an average of one tenant for its still
walls each day), and the receptacle for coffins.
On another side we find, still outside the noble
central quadrangle, the collegiate part of the
establishment, including the house in which a
portion of the students live, their dining-hall,
and the residence of the ever-present, ever-
working warden and assistant-surgeon, Mr.
Paget; and in the near neighbourhood, the
surgery, some surgical wards for special cases,
and the operating theatre. On a third flank,
we find within the hospital boundary nothing
less than the church of St. Bartholomew the
Less; and the reason of a parish church being
shut up, as it were, within the confines of a
special establishment, is explained by the fact,
that the hospital itself covers the whole
parish, with the exception of some three or
four houses! So that the place has its own
parochial jurisdiction, its own parish church,
its own parish meetings, its own parish vestries,
and its own parish rates. It stands, indeed,
a little principality, as it were, of its own,—
with the laws of charity for its institutions;
doctors and surgeons, and almoners, for its
ministers and chief officers; stewards, and
matrons, and ward-sisters, for its officers;
nurses, and surgery men, and cooks, and cellarmen for its subordinates; and the sick and
poor of the modern Babylon for its subjects.

To feed the large family residing in the
huge hospital is a serious affair. It being
now seven in the morning, and the physicking
being over, the nurses pay their first visit for
the day to the buttery, to fetch the allotted
quantities of food served out in the morning.
The patients are, of course, on different scales
of diet, according to their bodily condition.
Here is one day's list of how five hundred
and thirteen sick folks were ranked on the
diet list: One hundred and sixty-two on
"full diet," a hospital term which means the
following ample allowance for each day one
pint of milk porridge, fourteen ounces of
bread, meat weighing half a pound when
cooked, half a pound of potatoes, beer, two
pints for men and one pint for women, and
one ounce of butter. Next comes " half-diet"
which would be thought blissful abundance
by many folks outside the walls, for it means
the pint of milk porridge, twelve ounces of
bread, a quarter of a pound of cooked meat,
half a pound of cooked potatoes, a pint of beer,
and three quarters of an ounce of butter. In
" Broth-diet," broth and gruel are substituted
for the meat and beer, the other items being
nearly the same, with the addition that the
potatoes are mashed, and made more acceptable
to sick stomachs. " Milk-diet " almost
explains itself, it being chiefly milk, with
the addition of rice, sago, arrow-root, and
bread.

The zero of this feeding scale, " Low Diet,"
means those thin comforts—gruel, or barley-
water. Patients needing them have extra
allowances, when ordered by the medical
officers, such as mutton-chops, beef-tea, eggs,
pudding, jelly, porter, ale, wine, brandy, and
—hear it, Oh, Father Mathew—gin! No
wonder that the poor who have once tasted
the comforts of Bartholomew's in days of
sickness and tribulation should wish for
them again. The following scale is for one
day in December 1850: On full diet, 162
patients, 66 of them with extra allowances;
148 on half diet; 157 on milk; the remainder
being fed on broth, beef-tea, rice-milk, arrow-
root, and sago.

The meat used on the same day in the
hospital for patients and nurses, weighed
three hundred and four pounds, besides half-
a-hundred weight of beef for beef-tea, making
together three hundred and sixty pounds.
With this noble dish of mutton and beef, four
hundred and forty pounds' weight of bread
was eaten, accompanied by about one hundred
and fifty pounds' weight of potatoes, thirty
pounds of butter, fifty eggs, washed down
by fifty gallons of milk, and the butler only
knows how many gallons of beer. Not
a bad day's eating for a sick house! A
month's butcher's bill comes to one hundred
and fifty pounds; and a year's consumption
makes a very strong array of figures. Here
they are—

24,000 pounds of beef;
35,200 pounds of mutton;
16,760 gallons of milk;
12,000 eggs.

This is a glimpse of the sunshiny side of
the hospital fare. We shall presently find some
startling facts connected with the apothecaries'
department, one of which, however, we may