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Hospital Provision for Infectious Disease.
In my last report I gave some account of the present
arrangements in the Metropolis for the isolation of cases of
infectious disease.
It will be within the memory of the Vestry that they had
not thought it well to take advantage of that section of the
Poor Law Amendment Act of 1879, which gives power to the
Metropolitan Sanitary Authorities to contract with the
Metropolitan Asylums Board, for the admission into the
hospitals of that Board of cases of infectious disease occurring
among all classes of the community. The Vestry had
felt that they could not make such an arrangement until
the Metropolitan Asylums Board ceased to be of poor-law
constitution. For not only would patients sent to these
hospitals have been made paupers, and thus deprived of
certain of the rights of citizens, but it was obvious that
hospitals which are intended for the reception of persons
of all classes must not, if they are to be freely used, be under
the control of an authority whose chief function is to provide
for the destitute. The Vestry are to be congratulated that they
took this course, for the experience of the year 1881 proved
clearly enough that the Vestry acted wisely in the conclusion
to which they had come not to rely upon the hospitals of
the Metropolitan Asylums Board. Legal proceedings
on behaif of the inhabitants of the districts surrounding
the small pox hospitals of the Board led to the closure of
one of these institutions, and to the limitation of the use of
others of them to persons living immediately in their vicinity ;
and thus the Vestry would have been deprived, by circumstances
over which they had no control, of accommodation
which would have been absolutely necessary during the small
pox epidemic of that year.
The coarse which the Vestry adopted to meet the exigencies
of the epidemic of 1881 is not only creditable in the highest