NEWS

Our news obviously in the main refers to client’s work recent work that others made find of interest.

London 1896

When the company by whom I was employed, established in 1869, was relocating, I came across a map dated 1896. The concept illustrated was to transport sea water to the hospitals around London to provide theraputic baths to patients, a scheme promoted by a Parliamentary Select Committee. The water was to be pumped up from Lancing to Epsom and then fed by gravity to the hospitals. I am not sure that today’s doctors would have approved, bearing in mind the amount of sewage emptying into the sea during Victorian times.

What I found interesting was the map named all the various London hospitals of the time as well as other establishments  including workhouses and lunatic asylems. A snippet: In the Fulham Road there was the Consumption Hospital, reasonable one would have thought, but opposite a specialist Cancer hospital? The hospital was established by Dr William Marsden, later to become the Royal Marsden. Surgery was the only plausible answer at the time and was performed without anaesthesia or antisepsis.

I thought it might be interesting to re-draw the map without the sea water detail.