The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg

of recent Ministers of Health, 'Hospitals are for people'. We seldom get any glimpse of what the hospitals were really doing and what the condition of the wards in which the patients were nursed was like. When under the Local Government Act of 1929 the Metropolitan Asylums Board handed over its functions to the newly constituted London County Council, what was then the condition of the hospitals that the new authority took over? Did they require a great deal of improvement, or did they deteriorate? There is much that we should like to know on which Dr. Ayers is silent. Recollections of those who knew these hospitals soon after the take-over are possibly not entirely reliable but in their minds there remains an uncomplimentary picture which bears no comparison with the condition of the voluntary hospitals of that period. This massive account of the work of the Metropolitan Asylums Board is most thorough and will be of great interest to those who wish to follow the growth of the administrative machinery of the greater London Council.