nt of public laundries, under municipal direction.
No person is obliged to send any article of clothing to be washed at
the public laundry; but if he does not send there he must have the
washing done at home. Private laundries that do not come under the
inspection of the sanitary officer are absolutely forbidden. It
is incumbent on all who send clothes to the public laundry from an
infected house to state the fact. The clothes thus received are passed
for special cleansing into the disinfecting rooms. They are specially
washed, dried and prepared for future wear. The laundries are
placed in convenient positions, a little outside the town; they
have extensive drying grounds, and, practically, they are worked
so economically, that homewashing days, those invaders of domestic
comfort and health, are abolished.
Passing along the main streets of the city we see in twenty places,
equally distant, a separate building surrounded by its own grounds,--a
model hospital for the sick. To make these institutions the best of
their kind, no expense is spared. Several elements contribute to their
success. They are small, and are readily removable. The old idea of
warehousing diseases on the largest possible scale, and of making it
the boast of an institution that it contains so many hundred beds,
is abandoned here. The old idea of building an institution so that
it shall stand for centuries, like a Norman castle, but, unlike the
castle, still retain its original character as a shelter for the
afflicted, is abandoned here. The still more absurd idea of building
hospitals for the treatment of special organs of the body, as if the
different organs could walk out of the body and present themselves for
treatment, is also abandoned.
It will repay us a minute of time to look at one of these model
hospitals. One is the _fac simile_ of the other, and is devoted to the
service of every five thousand of the population. Like every building
in the place, it is erected on a subway. There is a wide central
entrance, to which there is no ascent, and into which a carriage, cab,
or ambulance can drive direct. On each side the gateway are the houses
of the resident medical officer and of the matron. Passing down the
centre, which is lofty and covered in with glass, we arrive at
two sidewings running right and left from the centre, and forming
cross-corridors. These are the wards: twelve on one hand for male,
twelve on the other for female patients. Th
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