InsideHistoryDigital

Today, we think of the hospital as an exemplar of
sanitation. However, during the first half of the
nineteenth century, hospitals were anything but
hygienic. They were breeding grounds for infection
and provided only the most primitive facilities for
the sick and dying, many of whom were housed on
wards with little ventilation or access to clean
water. As a result of this squalor, hospitals became
known as "Houses of Death.”
The best that can be said about Victorian hospitals
is that they were a slight improvement over their
Georgian predecessors. That's hardly a ringing
endorsement when one considers that a hospital's
"Chief Bug-Catcher" (whose job it was to rid the
mattresses of lice) was paid more than its surgeons
in the eighteenth century. In fact, bed bugs were so
common that the "Bug Destroyer" Andrew Cooke
(see image above) claimed to have cleared upwards
of 20,000 beds of insects during the course of his
career. [1]
In spite of token efforts to make them cleaner, most
hospitals remained overcrowded, grimy, and poorly
managed. The assistant surgeon at St. Thomas's
Hospital in London was expected to examine over
200 patients in a single day. The sick often
languished in filth for long periods before they
received medical attention, because most hospitals
were disastrously understaffed. In 1825, visitors to
St. George's Hospital discovered mushrooms and
wriggling maggots thriving in the damp, soiled
sheets of a patient with a compound fracture. The
afflicted man, believing this to be the norm, had
not complained about the conditions, nor had any
of his fellow convalescents thought the squalor
especially noteworthy. [2]
Worst of all was the fact that a sickening odor
permeated every hospital ward. The air was thick
with the stench of piss, shit, and vomit. The smell
was so offensive that the staff sometimes walked
around with handkerchiefs pressed to their noses.
Doctors didn't exactly smell like rose beds, either.
Berkeley Moynihan (one of the first surgeons in
England to use rubber gloves) recalled how he and
his colleagues used to throw off their own jackets
when entering the operating theater and don
ancient frocks that were often stiff with dried blood
and pus. They had belonged to retired members of
staff and were worn as badges of honor by their
proud successors, as were many items of surgical
clothing.
The operating theaters within these hospitals were
just as dirty as the surgeons working in them. In