To those boards of guardians who clung to the policy of "deterring" the sick poor from obtaining medical relief--which, as we have shown, Mr. Gathorne Hardy had, on behalf of the Central Authority, in 1867 expressly repudiated[690]--all this official encouragement to enter Poor Law institutions seemed revolutionary. The fact that the sick poor came more and more to draw a distinction between the workhouse on the one hand, and the Poor Law infirmary or isolation hospital on the other, appeared seriously objectionable. When it was noticed that the Central Authority officially styled the separate institution for the sick "an asylum for the sick poor,"[691] or "the hospital," or simply the "infirmary,"[692] the Manchester guardians revolted, and definitely instructed their medical and relieving officers "to avoid using the word 'hospital' or 'infirmary,' and simply to use the word 'workhouse.'"[693] Other boards, we believe, insisted--although "the infirmary" was an entirely distinct institution--that it should be entered only through the workhouse itself. Against this lingering objection on grounds of Poor Law policy to get the sick cured in the most efficient way, we see the inspectorate in the later years more and more explicitly protesting. "I wish it were possible," said Mr. Preston-Thomas in 1899, "to get rid of the name of workhouse (which, by the way, has become singularly inappropriate), for I believe that it is to the associations of the name rather than to the institution itself that prejudice attaches. The disinclination of the independent poor to enter the hospitals of the Metropolitan Asylums Board, which was considerable at first, has now practically vanished, and I do not see why there should not be the same change of feeling with regard to Poor Law infirmaries in the country."[694] [690] _Hansard_, 8th February 1867, vol. 185, p. 163; _see_ ante, pp. 120-21. [691] Metropolitan Poor Act 1867 (30 & 31 Vic. c. 6); Special Order to Central London Sick Asylum District, 13th May 1873. [692] Special Order to Lambeth, 25th August 1873. [693] MS. Minutes, Manchester Board of Guardians, 14th August 1879. Some of the inspectors seem to have shared this objection. As late as 1901 we find one reporting that "the admission into our workhouse infirmaries of persons above the pauper class, and not destitute, is, I fear, increasing" (Mr. J. W. Preston's Report, in Thirtieth Annual Report, 1900-1, p. 97). [694] Mr. Preston-Thomas's Report, in Twenty-eighth Annual Report, 1898-9, p. 135.