That the home can no longer compete with the hospital in the care of the sick is evident from the increasing demand throughout the country for hospitals of every type. In 1900 there were approximately 5,000 public and private hospitals in the United States. In 1910 the number of these institutions had increased to about 7,000. Therefore, while the fear of entering the hospital for any serious purpose is still real, these figures show that the prejudice against hospitals is diminishing rapidly. It may be interesting to compare the status of the hospital and the home in the preantiseptic period and to-day.
In a monograph John Aiken, a London surgeon of the early part of the nineteenth century, expressed his thoughts on hospitals as follows:
"Every surgeon attending a large and crowded hospital knows the very great difficulty of curing a compound fracture in them. This is so universally acknowledged