Having received this report, I sent it to Mr. Newton. At the same time I protested against his having sent for me to attend his court, and for the remarks he had made to me on the faith of the opinion expressed by a person of very little experience, and further informed him that I should continue to protest against the use of the wards of the Workhouse as a receptacle for merely drunken men and women, and should advise the master accordingly. The annoyance still continuing, I made a point of sending for the police each morning after every drunken admission. Then a new antagonistic element was imported in the shape of a letter to the Local Government Board from Mr. Timothy Holmes, containing a complaint against me for the trouble I was giving the police authorities in objecting to the reception of sick people from the station to the Workhouse. The letter having been sent to me to answer, I forwarded to the Local Government Board the names of some sixty persons brought in by the police under the certificate of the divisional surgeon, and showed that two-thirds of the entire number were proved to be only drunk and incapable, and that the rest were, in the majority of instances, very trivial cases of illness. The nuisance after this was very much diminished. It may be asked, What are the police to do with persons who allege that they are ill? Are these complaints to be disregarded? Certainly not. But I contend that reasonable care should be taken by police surgeons, before they send cases of alleged illness to a workhouse infirmary; for it must be remembered that they are paid a fee for each visit and examination. To go, therefore, to the station, make a cursory examination, and then write a certificate that the person is seriously ill and must be removed without delay, or in the case of a simply cut head send it at once away to the infirmary for the workhouse surgeon to get out of bed and dress it, is, in my judgment, an entirely unsatisfactory procedure, especially as the latter is paid no special fee, be his trouble ever so great. There was nothing in all my duty as a workhouse medical officer, which irritated me more than these police cases. I remember on one occasion a superintendent of police said to me, "I hold that if after our surgeon makes these mistakes he were to forfeit his fee, which should be paid to you, you would not have many then."