When to discharge a patient

doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7452.1342

BMJ 2004;328:1342 (5 June), doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7452.1342

Filler

Endpiece

When to discharge a patient

It is not always an easy matter for a physician to judge, withprecision, when a patient ought to be discharged from the hospital.It sometimes happens that patients, whose circumstances at homeare necessitous, and their lives laborious, wish to loiter inthe house as patients, and being cured of real diseases, wouldamuse the physician with fictitious feelings, of which he cannotconstitute himself a judge, as pain in the stomach or the bowels,general or local rheumatisms, and a variety of similar complaints.

The history and statutes of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. Edinburgh: E Balfour and Smellie, 1778: 86

Jeremy Hugh Baron, honorary professorial lecturer

Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York