Medical Committee Minutes March 1878 - Dec 1899 NHNN/A/9/1
A letter was read from the House Physicians relating to defects in the warming of the Wards and it was resolved:
“that the Medical Committee, having heard from the House Physicians that the temperature of the wards is frequently insufficiently high recommend that every endeavour be made to keep the wards to the temperature of 60°F as a minimum”
Board of Management Minutes: Jul 1894 – Jan 1902 NHNN/A/4/5
Extracts from a letter sent to Victor Horsley Esq FRS from G.C. Parker, Chairman of the Board
Sir,
I am authorised by the Board of Management to inform you that at a special meeting held on Saturday February 15th they carefully considered the recent correspondence between yourself and the Secretary-Director and arrived at the following conclusions.
[…]
3. With regard to your letter of the 6th February the Board must point out that the complaint in Mr Corben’s case which they had brought before them was made not my Mr Corben himself (the patient) but by his father. After having the evidence of Mr Rawlings and of his assistant the Board entertain no doubt that Mr Corben Senior complained that his son had not had the benefit of your attention; but after considering your explanation of the occurrence they are not prepared to say that the complaint of Mr Corben Senior was well founded. The discrepancy to which you refer is easily accounted for by the fact that while you rely on the statement of the patient himself the Board had before them only the complaint made by his father.
4. With respect to your statement that a sealed letter (addressed to you in the case of a patient called North in January 1895) was “intercepted and taken into the office, the seal broken and the letter either detained or destroyed”, the Board beg to inform you that neither they nor the Secretary-Director ever heard of the occurrence till it was reported by you in your letter now before them, that it is impossible at this distance of time to trace the fate of the letter and that if as you seem to assume the seal was broken in the office, the action was one which the Secretary-Director would not have sanctioned had he known of it.
[…]
6. With respect to the cases in which operation had been postponed for reasons not connected to the patients, I am to inform you that the Secretary-Director did not, as you imagine, report eight such cases as yours, but was quite aware that three were Mr Balance’s cases; with respect to three he received, as you say, satisfactory explanations from the House Physician; and with respect to the two remaining ones – Cleeves and Westcott – the Board having now received and considered your explanation, regard it as satisfactory, while they cannot help deeply deploring the necessity for prolonging the mutual distress of the patients.
With regard to the words of the Secretary-Director against which you protest, i.e. “it must not be taken that these two cases of inpatients exhaust the number in which complaint might reasonably have been made” the Board are entirely satisfied of Mr Rawlings bona fides but at the same time admit that you have a right to demur to what might be understood as the insinuation of charges against yourself or your colleagues over and above those which have been definitely formulated and examined.
7. In your concluding paragraph you justly claim from the Board the protection of your reputation. The Board beg to assure you that they are keenly alive to their duty in this regard, but that they do not conceive that your reputation is in the slightest degree imperilled by what has passed. The Subject matter of this correspondence has been and will be treated by the Board as entirely confidential and they believe that you may be perfectly at your ease as regards your reputation.
8. At the same time the Board are no less jealous of the reputation of the Secretary-Director – an old and valued servant of the Hospital – and they find themselves bound to repudiate on his behalf such charges as “distortion”, “misrepresentation” and “malicious fabrication”. Even if it had been impossible to obtain definite proof of alleged irregularities those irregularities would not necessarily be “fabrications”, still less “malicious” ones.