HarperElement
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FIRST EDITION
© Petrina Banfield 2018
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Source ISBN: 9780008264703
Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008264741
Version: 2018-06-21
Contents
This is no case of a ‘chateau en Espagne’ – a castle in the air – there it stands in solid bricks and mortar. It is as real as the poor suffering creature who lies at your feet at the doorstep, as you pass home in the dark … I believe there are in this great town hundreds of well disposed people so struck to the heart by the spectacles which the streets of this great city present that they would gladly do anything to set those things right if only they knew how.
(Charles Dickens’ fundraising speech on behalf of the Royal Free Hospital, 6 May 1863)
In the spring of 1828 a small apothecary in Greville Street, Hatton Garden, opened its doors to the poor. ‘Persons not able to pay for medicines will be furnished with them free’ promised its founder, William Marsden, a young surgeon from Yorkshire. Marsden also declared that the only necessary qualifications for being seen by the three voluntary physicians working there were ‘poverty and disease’.
It was a revolutionary idea. Until the arrival of the apothecary, which was originally known as the London General Institution for the Gratuitous Cure of Malignant Diseases, there had been few appealing options for London’s ailing poor. A few hospitals admitted patients on an emergency basis, but only at the discretion of the doctor on duty.
William Marsden had been moved to take drastic action to improve the dire situation after encountering ‘in the street at a winter’s dawn a desperately ill girl whom,’ reported the Daily Chronicle in 1902, ‘having no influence with governors, he could not get into any existing hospital’.
It was shortly before Christmas in 1827, and despite her being accompanied by a respectable gentleman, the local hospitals refused to admit her, it is thought, because they suspected that she was a prostitute in the grip of venereal disease. Marsden, a newly qualified doctor, carried the girl to his personal lodgings and cared for her himself. When she died, two days later, he vowed to open a hospital that was free for all and discriminatory against none.
Plans were drawn up on a late winter’s day in February 1828, in a little coffee shop in Gray’s Inn Road. Within two months the apothecary was up and running, the poor of London streaming in through its doors. Just under a thousand patients were treated in the apothecary in its first year, with almost four times as many on the receiving end of its charity four years later.
William Marsden perhaps could not ever have imagined that almost two centuries after the small apothecary was established, a quarter of a million outpatients would pass annually through the Royal Free Hospital’s doors.
The outpatients department of the Royal Free was one of the busiest in London in 1922, and it was in full swing when Alice Hudson crossed the atrium the next morning, on Thursday, 5 January.
It was 9 a.m., just over forty-eight hours since the almoner had overseen Charlotte Redbourne’s committal into hospital. The notes on her desk revealed her eagerness to return to Banstead to check on the teenager, but there was little flexibility in her schedule to allow for a time-consuming journey out of town.
The Woods had already made themselves comfortable, a horsehair blanket draped over Ted’s knees. A half-finished knitted shawl was spread over Hetty’s lap, one of many she was making to donate to the abandoned babies on the wards upstairs. ‘I’m not sure there is much I can do for your daughter at the moment, I’m afraid,’ Alice said quietly as she eased herself into the narrow space on the bench beside Hetty.
The stale smell that pervaded the air in the department intensified. Alice stilled for a moment and frowned. There was a pause and then she said: ‘How Mr Simpkins manages his money is only something I can involve myself in if invited, but I suspect –’
‘Oh yes, we know most of his income ends up in the tills of the Red Lion, duck,’ Hetty said, lowering her knitting needles to her lap. ‘No, you don’t want