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Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3051, 6 April 1881, Page 2

Our morning contemporary inserts an extract from an article from what puports to be a leading English medical journal—be is careful not to particularise which—referring to the management ot some Paris Hospitals that permit the confinement of women in the general wards, and which depicts the fearful mortality from infection due to this terrible mismanagement. With this we have nothing to do, but we give au unhesitating denial to the statement that " this is the state of things which was proposed to be introduced into the Hawke's Bay Hospital a few weeks ago." It was proposed to treat women introduced for tbe purposes of confiuetnent in rooms set apart for that purpose when the Hospital was built, these rooms being placed in a wing distinct from the general ward, and where the patients would certainly be as safe from the influence of infection, —in our opinion safer, —as any person at her own home. But why, we may ask, is this bugbear of infection suddenly brought up ? It is for the purpose of defending a bad rule that was formulated— wehope in haste—and would never have been passed by the Committee had the majority been aware of its existence ? We would also ask, were the hospital authorities conversant with this matter, last October? and, if so, how it was they permitted a widow with one child dependent upon her to be confined of a second child in a room immediately adjoining tbe general ward, where, as far as her personal safety was concerned, she might have been with the other female patients ? Possibly those concerned held Braminical notions, and considered that the wife should follow her husband to the regions of bliss; and this was an opportune substitute for the latter.