3-082-542 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Views of St. Thomas's Hospital: the terrace of the hospital, 1895. '...the Governors...have appealed to the public for £100,000. The Queen has subscribed £100. A round £100,000 is a goodly aims, but larger sums have been raised fur less salutary purposes. St. Thomas's has never been among the begging hospitals. It has taken nothing from Hospital Saturday or Sunday funds, and not much from the dole-giving public. For three hundred years it has lived upon its own resources, which were not inconsiderable; but the shifting fortunes of the age have touched it to its material injury...the Governors have been obliged to close three of their principal wards, and to set apart two others for well-to-do-patients, whose payments they could no longer afford to reject. Here, therefore, are five wards taken from the needs of the poor, for St. Thomas's is, and always has been, essentially a poor man's charity...St. Thomas's...[is] one of the oldest existing hospitals in the kingdom...the new building at Westminster Bridge...[opened] in 1871. The present site - which, moreover, was the only available one - is about the finest for its purpose in Europe, and the hospital which stands on it must be a model for Europe during many generations'. From "Illustrated London News", 1895.