HOW WE TREAT OUR SICK.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 458, 22 May 1909, Page 3

HOW WE TREAT OUR SICK.

In a vigorous protest against the admission of delirium tremens patients to the general hospitals the Wellington Citizen quotes some startling instances of what D.T. cases mean. In one case at dead of night, it says, the patient ran up and down the ward shrieking and leaping the beds. The nurse screamed for help and a male attendant came ; a struggle took place, and the man was mastered by being flung on the ground and jumped on with both knees. A minor incident was that another patient over whose bed the nurse and the attendant were struggling with the madman died before morning. In another hospital a D.T. got a nurse on the floor, and would have killed her had not a convalescent leaped from his bed and seized a weapon. Yet they talk of the present dearth of nurses. At Wellington hospital recently a woman in delirium tremens fled as if pursued by furies through the upper window of a two-storeyed building, and after much searching was found dying in a coal shed. It is time (the Citizen contends) that the sick and dying in the hospitals were protected from this sort of thing.