Medicine: Sawdust Beds

How best to bed down helpless, untidy insane patients Dr. William R. Thompson of the Eastern State Hospital at Lexington, Ky., describes in the Journal of the American Medical Association: He has 34 beds that are “oblong boxes, made of one-inch dressed boards; 6½ ft. long, 30 in. wide and 18 in. deep, standing on legs twelve inches high and painted white. They are filled with fresh sawdust within six inches of the top. From such a trough, the patient cannot tumble out; an attendant can scoop out any sawdust . . . patients do not suffer any inconvenience whatever.”