On 10 July 1909 The Illustrated London News carried a special supplement, with the title: The Web of the World.
The subhead explained: Being an account of Manchester & its Great Industries.
The occasion for the supplement was the visit of King Edward VII to open the new Infirmary:
“A particularly fine building & particularly well planned. The hospital has some 50 blocks of buildings, connected by some 3 or 4 miles of corridors; has 5 staircases & 18 lifts; & can accommodate 600 patients. EACH SURGEON HAS HIS OWN OPERATING THEATRE.
Manchester has led the way in removing its Royal Infirmary from … the very heart of the city to new buildings on the outskirts, where the surroundings permit hospital work to be carried out under the best possible conditions.”
The supplement contained an admiring section on the kitchens of the new Infirmary: “ If our ultra-civilisation has inflicted the modern man with ‘nerves’ & a bad digestion, it has at least also created a new era in medicine … from the serious study of food & food values has evolved the modern science of dietetics.” Much of this advance is credited to Sir William Roberts the first professor of medicine at what later became the Victoria University of Manchester. He collaborated with Manchester chemist Frederick Benger to produce the eponymous food which ‘digests itself’
[ Simon Singh may or may not like to note that Roberts's role also involved attempting to reduce the influence of homoeopathy. In 1862 he issued a pamphlet entitled Homoeopathy as Practised in Manchester Contrasted with its Alleged Principles, which showed that many homoeopaths administered large doses of powerful drugs rather than infinitesimally small doses of homoeopathic remedies.]
A Google search for “the web of the world” (with the quote marks in place) produced nearly 9 million hits, mostly relating to the modern usage of the phrase. But fine tuning revealed that the phrase was quite commonly used in the early years of the twentieth century, inspired by thoughts of Empire & the connectedness that this gave to the world.
I also discovered that Swinburne was very attached to the image of the web, the connectedness between things; there are several uses of the word in his 1871 collection, Songs Before Sunrise. To quote just three examples:
from ODE ON THE INSURRECTION IN CANDIA
Is there change in the secret skies,
In the sacred places that see
The divine beginning of things,
The weft of the web of the world?
from THE EVE OF REVOLUTION
O many-childed mother great and grey,
O multitudinous bosom, and breasts that bare
Our fathers' generations, whereat lay
The weanling peoples and the tribes that were,
Whose new-born mouths long dead
Those ninefold nipples fed,
Dim face with deathless eyes and withered hair,
Fostress of obscure lands,
Whose multiplying hands
Wove the world's web with divers races fair
And cast it waif-wise on the stream,
The waters of the centuries, where thou sat'st to dream;
from TO WALT WHITMAN IN AMERICA
For a continent bloodless with travail
Here toils and brawls as it can,
And the web of it who shall unravel
Of all that peer on the plan;
Would fain grow men, but they grow not,
And fain be free, but they know not
One name for freedom and man?
Songs Before Sunrise also contains Swinburne's An Appeal to England , which was origianlly published in pamphlets & newspapers as an appeal for reprieve of the Manchester Martyrs.
That 1909 building is now the HQ of the Central Manchester and Manchester Children's University Hospitals Trust, while the constituent hospitals all have even more modern homes nearby. I wonder what happened to those former operating theatres which are now 100 years old?
