| Guislain wrote about his visit to the Ospedale Maggiore on pages 257-259 of his Lettres Médicales sur l'Italie avec Quelques Renseignements sur la Suisse: Résumé d'un Voyage fait en 1838, Adressé à la Société de Médecine de Gand (F. & E. Gyselynck : Ghent 1840). Guislain regarded the Ospedale Maggiore as one of the most beautiful buildings in Milan, if not in the world. He described one of its spacious and rectangular shaped courtyards, surrounded by covered galleries, and wondered why the architects provided courtyards of this size, believing it inadvisable for patients to walk outside in the warm Italian climate. The hospital maintained a separation between male and female patients, not by accommodating men on the ground floor of a building and women on its first floor, as was customary elsewhere in Italy, but by placing them in wards that faced onto separate inner courtyards - an expedient of which Guislain approved. Guislain observed wide corridors between wards affording space for the patients to walk around but no curtains around the iron beds which could be used to ensure the privacy of patients. The surgical wards were smaller, containing no more than four beds each, so as to facilitate a greater degree of privacy and quiet. When Guislain visited, the hospital accommodated 1700 patients, in a building which could accommodate 2500. ‘Calm’ psychiatric patients with a range of acute symptoms were accommodated in a separate ward, which was furnished as lavishly as Guislain had come to expect in northern Italian hospitals. These patients were grouped according to their symptoms, and not locked away as might have been the case if their mental condition was congenital or chronic. |
