The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To CHARLES MURCHISON,1 24 March 1862

Replaces extract in Pilgrim Letters 10, p. 58.

Text from facsimile in Alexander Historical Auctions online catalogue, Nov 2018.

OFFICE OF ALL THE YEAR ROUND
Monday Twenty Fourth March 1862

Sir

    I beg to assure you that I am happy to have any opportunity of helping so excellent an Institution as the Fever Hospital,2 and of testifying my respect for the good and earnest men who work in it. The Committee are at perfect liberty to reprint the article, "A Mortal Struggle"3 in their Report, or otherwise, as may best serve their benevolent object.

        Faithfully Yours

            CHARLES DICKENS

Dr Murchison

• 1. Charles Murchison (1830-79; Dictionary of National Biography), MD, FRCP, Physician to the London Fever Hospital 1861-70; authority on continued fevers and diseases of the liver. He published over 300 papers, mainly in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, the British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review, and the Transactions of the Pathological Society, and was an occasional leader writer for the British Medical Journal. He also authored the ground-breaking Treatise on the Continued Fevers of Great Britain (1862).
• 2. The London Fever Hospital, in Liverpool Road, Islington, a voluntary hospital founded from public donations; originally the Institution for the Cure and Prevention of Contagious Fever in the Metropolis.
• 3. By Henry Morley, in All the Year Round 6 (1 March 1862): 542-3; an account of the Fever Hospital, and the pressures it faced through a lack of resources.