Madam, - While browsing through an old volume of the Dublin Historical Record the other day, I came across the following from the minutes of the Meath Hospital for November 1812:
"The Hospital is upon a scale totally inadequate to the number of applications for admission. The physicians and surgeons are daily obliged to send away persons in the most pressing need of medical and surgical assistance, many of whom, it is feared, perish in neglect; and when accidents are numerous it often becomes necessary to put two patients in one bed, a circumstance disgraceful to a regular hospital".
My first thought was, "My God, had they no trolleys?"
My second was: "How little things have changed in nearly 200 years." - Yours, etc,
DERMOT O'SHEA, Meadow Grove, Churchtown, Dublin 16.