THE LONDON HOSPITAL.
[To TEE EDITOR OE TER "SPIITATOR."1 SIR,—In your article on " The Open-Air Hospital at Cam- bridge" in last week's Spectator you quote Dr. Shipley as saying that in an ordinary hospital the expense works out at £200 a bed, and that at the London Hospital, which you are hind enough to say is a notoriously well-managed hospital, the expense is more like £300 to £400. This is compared
with the cost at Cambridge, which Dr. Shipley says was only £16.
This statement of Dr. Shipley's has brought much corre- spondence on me, and some abuse. So will you allow me to state that Dr. Shipley was only comparing the cost of con- struction, not of upkeep P The two things are not comparable —a hospital built for all time (the London is nearly two hundred years old) and a hospital erected for merely tem- porary use. I could erect a wooden shelter to hold four patients for £20, but I could not build a cottage to hold them for less than £200. The expense of upkeep at the London Hospital, including everything, in- and out-patients, is about £120 a bed. The expense incurred by hospitals doing special work, like the hospital for officers suffering from shock, is a good deal more. All depends on the sort of work done.— I am, Sir, &c., KisuTsPonD. Kneesworth. Hall, Royston, Herts.
[We fully understood Dr. Shipley to mean that for con- structional purposes, not for those of upkeep, the hospital cost only £16 per bed, since corrected in his letter to Thursday's Times to £16 17s. 6d. per bed. A construction. or housing comparison is worth making, but we agree that differences in apparatus and special forms of treatment make comparison in working expenses almost valueless.— ED. Spectator.]
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