was ultimately to clothe some wealthy damsel rejoicing in her morning ride act as the coverlet of a poor tailor's child stricken with malignant scarlet fever. These things must be, in the ordinary course of events under our present bad sanitary system. In the model city we have in our mind's eye, these dangers are met by the simple provision of workmen's offices or workrooms. In convenient parts of the town there are blocks of buildings, designed mainly after the manner of the houses, in which each workman can have a work-room on payment of a moderate sum per week. Here he may work as many hours as he pleases, but he may not transform the room into a home. Each block is under the charge of a superintendent, and also under the observation of the sanitary authorities. The family is thus separated from the work, and the working man is secured the same advantages as the lawyer, the merchant, the banker now possesses: or to make the parallel more correct, he has the same advantage as the man or woman who works in a factory, and goes home to eat and to sleep.

In most towns throughout the kingdom the laundry system is dangerous in the extreme. For anything the healthy householder knows, the clothes he and his children wear have been mixed before, during, and after the process of washing, with the clothes that have come from the bed or the body of some sufferer from a contagious malady. Some of the most fatal outbreaks of disease I have met with have been communicated in this manner. In our model community this danger is entirely avoided by the establishment of public laundries, under municipal direction. No person is obliged to send any article of clothing to be washed at the public laundry; but if he does not send there he must have the washing done at home. Private laundries that do not come under the inspection of the sanitary officer are absolutely forbidden. It is incumbent on all who send clothes to the public laundry from an infected house to state the fact. The clothes thus received are passed for special cleansing into the disinfecting rooms. They are specially washed, dried and prepared for future wear. The laundries are placed in convenient positions, a little outside the town; they have extensive drying grounds, and, practically, they are worked so economically, that homewashing days, those invaders of domestic comfort and health, are abolished.

Passing along the main streets of the city we see in twenty places, equally distant, a separate building surrounded by its own grounds,—a model hospital for the sick. To make these institutions the best of their kind, no expense is spared. Several elements contribute to their success. They are small, and are readily removable. The old idea of warehousing diseases on the largest possible scale, and of making it the boast of an institution that it contains so many hundred beds, is abandoned here. The old idea of building an institution so that it shall stand for centuries, like a Norman castle, but, unlike the castle, still retain its original character as a shelter for the afflicted, is abandoned here. The still more absurd idea of building hospitals for the treatment of special organs of the body, as if the different organs could walk out of the body and present themselves for treatment, is also abandoned.

It will repay us a minute of time to look at one of these model hospitals. One is the fac simile of the other, and is devoted to the service of every five thousand of the population. Like every building in the place, it is erected on a subway. There is a wide central entrance, to which there is no ascent, and into which a carriage, cab, or ambulance can drive direct. On each side the gateway are the houses of the resident medical officer and of the matron. Passing down the centre, which is lofty and covered in with glass, we arrive at two sidewings running right and left from the centre, and forming cross-corridors. These are the wards: twelve on one hand for male, twelve on the other for female patients. The cross-corridors are twelve feet wide and twenty feet high, and are roofed with glass; The corridor on each side is a framework of walls of glazed brick, arched over head, and divided into six segments. In each segment is a separate, light, elegant removable ward, constructed of glass and iron, twelve feet high, fourteen feet long, and ten feet wide. The cubic capacity of each ward is 1,680 feet. Every patient who is ill enough to require constant attendance has one of these wards entirely to himself, so that the injurious influences on the sick, which are created by mixing up, in one large room, the living and the dying; those who could sleep, were they at rest, with those who cannot sleep, because they are racked with pain; those who are too nervous or sensitive to move, or cough, or speak, lest they should disturb others; and those who do whatever pleases them:—these bad influences are absent.

The wards are fitted up neatly and elegantly. At one end they open into the corridor, at the other towards a verandah which leads to a garden. In bright weather those sick persons, who are even confined to bed, can, under the direction of the doctor, be wheeled in their beds out into the gardens without leaving the level floor. The wards are warmed by a current of air made to circulate through them by the action of a steam-engine, with which every hospital is supplied, and which performs such a number of useful purposes, that the wonder is, how hospital management could go on without the engine.

If at any time a ward becomes infectious, it is removed from its position and is replaced by a new ward. It is then taken to pieces, disinfected, and laid by ready to replace another that may require temporary ejection.

The hospital is supplied on each side with ordinary baths, hot-air baths, vapour baths, and saline baths.

A day sitting-room is attached to each wing, and every reasonable method is taken for engaging the minds of the sick in agreeable and harmless pastimes.

Two trained nurses attend to each corridor, and connected with the hospital is a school for nurses, under the direction of the medical superintendent and the matron. From this school, nurses are provided for the town; they are not merely efficient for any duty in the vocation in which they are always engaged, either within the hospital or out of it, but from the care with which they attend to their own personal cleanliness, and the plan they pursue of changing every garment on leaving an infectious case, they fail to be the bearers of any communicable disease. To one hospital four medical officers are appointed, each of whom, therefore, has six resident patients under his care. The officers are called simply medical officers, the distinction, now altogether obsolete, between physicians and surgeons being discarded.

The hospital is brought, by an electrical wire, into communication with all the fire-stations, factories, mills, theatres, and other important public places. It has an ambulance always ready to be sent out to bring any injured persons to the institution. The ambulance drives straight into the hospital, where a bed of the same height on silent wheels, so that it can be moved without vibration into a ward, receives the patient.

The kitchens, laundries, and laboratories are in a separate block at the back of the institution, but are connected with it by the central corridor. The kitchen and laundries are at the top of this building, the laboratories below. The disinfecting-room is close to the engine-room, and superheated steam, which the engine supplies, is used for disinfection.

The out-patient department, which is apart from the body of the hospital, resembles that of the Queen's Hospital, Birmingham,—the first out-patient department, as far as I am aware, that ever deserved to be seen by a generous public. The patients waiting for advice are seated in a large hall, warmed at all seasons to a proper heat, lighted from the top through a glass roof, and perfectly ventilated. The infectious cases are separated carefully from the rest.