ABSTRACT
A few days after the Holy Week, our travellers decided on visiting some of the far-famed charitable institutions of Seville; and taking the kind and benevolent Padre B—as their interpreter, they went first to the Hospital del Sangre, or of the ‘five Wounds,’ a magnificent building of the sixteenth century, with a Doric façade 600 feet long, a beautiful portal, and a ‘patio,’ in the centre of which is the church, a fine building, built in the shape of a Latin cross, and containing one or two good Zurbarans. There are between 300 and 400 patients; and in addition to the large wards, there are—what is so much needed in our great London hospitals, and which we have before alluded to at Madrid—a number of nicely-furnished little separate rooms for a higher class of patients, who pay about two shillings a day, and have both the skill of the doctors and the tender care of the sisters of charity, instead of being neglected in their own homes. There was a poor priest in one of these apartments, in another a painter, and in a third a naval captain, a Swede, and so on. The hospital is abundantly supplied with everything ordered by the doctors, including wine, brandy, chickens, or the like; and in this respect is a great contrast to that at Malaga, where the patients literally die for want of the necessary extra diets and stimulants which the parsimony of the administration denies them. In each quadrangle is a nice garden, with seats and fountains, and full of sweet flowers, where the patients, when well enough, can sit out and enjoy the sunshine. There is not the slightest hospital smell in any one of the wards. The whole is under the administration of the Spanish sisters of charity of St. Vincent de Paul; and knowing that, no surprise was felt at the perfection of the ‘lingerie,’ or the admirable arrangement and order of the hospital. They have a touching custom when one of the patients is dying, and has received the viaticum, to place above his head a special cross, so that he may be left undisturbed by casual visitors. The sisters have a little oratory upstairs, near the women’s ward, beautifully fitted up. An air of refinement, of comfort, and of home, pervades the whole establishment.
