HALF A CENTURY IN BED

Evening Star, Issue 12765, 19 March 1906, Page 4

HALF A CENTURY IN BED

That am incurable disease need not necessarily be a bar to a long and relatively happy 'life is proved, by the remarkable story of a patient s who has just, died at tlio Royal Hospital for Incurables, Putney (England). The- institution was opened in 1854, and in. November? of that year. Miss Relfe, then twenty-nine years of age, entered as the\ first patient. She Tras Suffer-. iftg from paralysis, of the muscles of thethroat and paralysis of the arms and legSj and her case from the first was hopeless. Although so cruelly aifflicted, she lingered on for fifty.-oiie years, and died at the la|t from senilo decay at the. age of eighty. Her long period of residence had cost tho institution£3,soo. "She enjoyed life after a fashion, and took a great interest in' all that wasgohig on," was the matron's comment. The same institution furnishes numerous other examples, hardly less remarkable, of tenacious clinging to life on.tht' part of sufferers who arc terribly handi capped by bodily ills.. Still living in tho hospital is a woman, a martyr to paralysis, who entered in 1857, and there arc several who; hare been inmates for forty years. A woman who obtained admittance in '1864 has never left her bed since. Another old woman, still handsome of face, the personification, of contented happiness, has kept to her bed for twenty-seven yearn. The men incurables, for some reason, do not live as lo.no- as the women, but in the hospital there is one man. who entered in 1866, and another who has been there for thirty-fiv© years. "These poor people," observed tho matron, "although all suffering from some incurable disuse, do not come here to die, but to live, and most of them live to an astonishing age."