The New Hospitall

14 December, in the year of our Lord 2022

Lay long in bed, my sleep the best for many nights, the pain in my back still being great, though not as great as it was. This morning comes the Messenger with a note from a Physician at the New St. Thos. Hospitalle, who cares for the aged, wherein that my father remayns upon a bench in a corridor in the Emergencie Department, which troubled me greatly that a man of his age should still be there, and not admitted upon a ward. Breakfast done and the mayde for the morning gone, I by my coach to visit my father. But Lord! what a teeming place is the New Hospitall, where even the most casual glance shews the gallery where wait the poor souls still to be seen to be too small, all cramped together with their infirmities and deformities, ideally to spread the plague: those here with the catarrh, ague and disentery, the stench of bodily fluxions obliging me to clamp my kerchief over my nose; those there bleeding through a filthy bandage, or slumped with a limb angled as it should not [be], the noise of wailing compelling me to step back; above all, a boy with ringwormed scalp and in his hand a fumigator, stepping indifferent over one dead of the dropsy. I cannot fathom how an antechamber in such a New Hospitall come to be built, which is no bigger than the old. By and by, I did find my father, thanks be to God, in a quiet corrider, warm and with abundant candles, away from any squalour, lying upon a bench in no discomfort and his breathing this morning less laboured, which comforted me; and they are about the business of finding him a bed in the Frailtie Ward. Thence to my coach, a course precarious for the ice still upon the roads, and the coach park, not being moved, further from the New Hospitall than the old, which was not some small distance; and I all the while reliant upon my armcrutch lest I fall, for the last I wish is to end up in that anteroom with a limb angled not as it should be. Thence home, where a message that the morning mayde hath broken the door on the Applyance wherein my father washes their clothes, so that clothes and sheets are in there, soaked, and the door locked. After dinner, I to the Turkish barber, who shaved my head for my periwig, and my beard also, and a lighted flame passed about my ears, and the tight muscles of my neck eased, this being the single event of the day that soothed me. And so home, where supped with my mother, who stayed late before sleeping, and after she to bed my mind turned towards finding a physio.