On each floor are 6 wards, containing 3 beds each, in which the patients are delivered, with an average of 1,000 cubic feet to each patient. On each floor, also, is one convalescent ward, containing 6 beds. Two floors are devoted to patients: one for married, and one for single women. As soon as 3 patients have been delivered in a ward, it remains vacant for 8 or 10 days, and is cleansed. Patients are removed as soon as possible to the convalescent ward. When a case of fever occurs, the ward is freshly whitewashed, and not occupied again for at least a month. [Illustration: PLAN I SECTION. _Queen Charlotte’s Lying-in Hospital._ FIRST FLOOR PLAN. _Scale_ _M & N HANHART, LITH._ ] In this building we have three floors and a basement. A drain runs from back to front of the building, right across the basement—a most unsafe course for a drain in any inhabited building.[11] It will be seen that the rooms are placed on opposite sides of a main corridor running the lengthway of the building on each floor; that the corridors of the different floors communicate by the stairs; that the ventilation of each room communicates with the ventilation of every other room through the corridors; that none of the rooms have windows on opposite sides, and that there are water-closets having a ventilation common to that of the building. Now every one of these structural arrangements is objectionable, and would be considered so in any good hospital, and nobody now-a-days would venture to include all of them in a general hospital plan. They are hence _à fortiori_ altogether inadmissible in a building for the reception of lying-in women. We have thus, in Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, the following defects:— 1. Agglomeration of a number of cases under the same roof. 2. A form of construction unsuited for hospital purposes. 3. No means of removing outside the building febrile or other cases of puerperal diseases from the vicinity of patients recovering after delivery. Since 1856, notwithstanding the great improvements, the death-rates per 1,000 have been 12·2, 8·8, 81·2, 70·3, 54·2, 39·2, 15·5, and so on: in several years very considerably larger than the mortality which led to the closing of the lying-in wards in King’s College Hospital. These varying deaths lead to the exercise of much caution in drawing conclusions as to their causes; but the main fact remains, namely, there are the death-rates, and they are many times greater than occur among London poor women delivered at home. _Midwifery Wards, King’s College Hospital._—The following plan shows the provision which existed for training midwifery nurses at King’s College Hospital. [Illustration: MIDWIFERY WARDS, KING’S COLLEGE HOSPITAL. (_Plan of Third Floor._) ] _A, A._ Accouchement Wards, used alternately. _B._ Recovery Ward. _C._ Contains Linen Presses, and Infants’ Baths, &c., for Ward use. _D._ Superior’s Bed-room.