12 OCTOBER

1895 As part of its campaign to improve the nursing and administration in Irish workhouses, the British Medical Journal today published a report from its Commissioners following their visit to the workhouse at Cootehill, County Cavan. They were dismayed by the 'squalor and wretchedness' that greeted their eyes as they toured the buildings. The aged inmates' quarters were particularly grim:

The rooms were dirty, the patients were unkempt and unwashed, and as the only materials that we saw for the toilet were a tin basin and a dirty round towel this was not to be wondered at... There are no indoor conveniences, and that the privies are at some distance from the wards, and therefore unavailable in bad weather or at night; to meet this difficulty the old people are provided with open pails or buckets; in the sick wards these buckets are enclosed in a wooden chair. It must also be observed that the infirm wards are locked on the outside from 7 p.m. until 6.30 a.m. The greater part of that time the ward is in darkness, and the only assistance available is such as the inmates can render to each other. The pails remain unemptied until the morning in both the sick and the infirm wards. We pictured to ourselves these wards locked up, the windows closed to husband the feeble warmth of the stove; the inmates on their narrow beds, from which they may slip to the floor in their weakness and there remain until the morning; the filthy-smelling buckets, some doubtless upset in the dark; no water to be had, no help available except in case of dire need; we turned away sick at heart that such things should be. In the sick wards the nurse is at hand, but there is no night nurse, and the excreta of the sick poison the air in those crowded wards. In the lunatic wards the same unsavoury method prevails, and the well-known dirty habits of the feeble-minded add to the foulness of the surroundings.