Our visitor for C 13, having escaped from the
back of the Scottish baronial building, emerges into a vista of covered
corridors, wooden-floored, galvanised-iron roofed. It is a heartbreaking
vista to the poor woman who has had no bus-fare and is burdened by a
baby in arms. It is a vista which seems to have no end. Corridor
branches out of corridor--A Corridor, B Corridor, C Corridor, D
Corridor, each with its perspective of doors opening into wards; and
shorter corridors leading to store-rooms and the like. But the patient
or orderly who has dwelt in a hospital where, though distances are
shorter, staircases are involved--or where every trifling
coming-and-going of goods or stretchers necessitates the manipulation of
a lift--blesses those level, smooth corridors, with their facile access
to any ward, to operating theatres, kitchens, stores, X-ray room,
massage department, etc., and their stepless exit into the open air.
Looked at from outside, a hut-ward is--to the aesthetic eye--a hideous
structure. Knowing what it stands for, the science, the tenderness and
the fundamental civilisation which it represents, we may descry, behind
its stark geometrical outlines, a real nobility and beauty.
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