Report of the Committee of the Portland Hospital.

  • Portland Hospital (South Africa). Committee.
Date:
1901
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Report of the Committee of the Portland Hospital. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    and our packing cases were preserved from damage for future moves of the hospital. The pack store and ordnance clothing stores had necessarily to be in a separate tent. The ordnance stores were arranged in a tent, and patients who had lost their clothing were re-fitted there. A strong safe was kept in the office, where all money and valuables belonging to patients were kept. Some patients have handed in sums of £^o and £60 at a time for safe custody. The officers' mess was located in a green tortoise tent with a floor of coir matting. We arranged to have a combined mess, so that medical officers and convalescent officers and their friends should mess together. A daily menu card, which included luncheon and dinner for the day and breakfast the day following, was useful, inasmuch as sick officers on full diet, but who were not able to come to mess, could select their own food. (Specimen menus. Appendix D). The food in mess consisted of each officer's rations supplemented by extras ordered for those who might be patients, by mess stores, and by local purchases of milk, eggs, fruit, and vegetable;;. The mess stores from England were packed in two ways: (i) Small quantities of various foods were packed in numbered cases, and catalogued so that each case had an assortment of food. (2) Other cases were each filled with one kind of food or other stores. The former is the better method if one anticipates much movement, and the latter if the hospital is to be more stationary. A judicious combination of the two methods would be the best. There are certain articles of food which we found were in great demand, such as jams, especially Cape jams, which are of most excellent quality, oatmeal, milk, particularly unsweetened milk and Dahl's Norwegian milk, small tins of cream, pressed beef, arrowroot, cigarettes, etc. Enamel-ware plates and di.shes were in stock for use during moves, but these were replaced completely, whenever we became stationary, with crockery and glass.