To anyone acquainted with that strange neighbourhood which is represented by Gray's Inn Lane and all the queer jumble of courts and alleys that seem to shrink behind the shelter of the broad thoroughfare of Holborn, there is something consistent in the establishment of such a noble charity as this hospital in Gray's Inn Road. Its very position seems to indicate the nature and extent of its duties. Near the homes of poverty, the streets where people live who cannot go far to seek aid in their extremest need, it receives those who, breaking down through sudden disease, or requiring medical and surgical skill to relieve the pain and weakness of recurrent malady, have no resource but this to enable them to fulfil their one great desire "to get back to work." The causes of much of the sickness which sends patients thither may be preventable: they may be found in foul dwellings, impure water, insufficient clothing, want of proper food, alternate hunger and intemperance; but whatever may be its occasion, a remedy must be found for it. Till all that is preventable is prevented, the consequences will have to be mitigated, the fatal results averted where it is possible; and when boards of health and sanitary measures have done, there will still be sick men to heal, failing children to strengthen, weak and wasting women to restore. It is well, then, that this Institution should stand as a landmark of that free charity which takes help where it {264} is needed most; and this qualification is the more obvious when we turn from the sick wards to the accident wards, and remember that three great railway termini are close at hand, and others not far off; that all round that teeming neighbourhood men, women, and even children, are working at poor handicrafts, which render them liable to frequent injuries, and that in the crowded streets themselves—from the great busy thoroughfare of Holborn, to the bustle and confusion of the approaches to the stations at King's Cross—there is constant peril to life and limb.