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15
Last Summer the Brook Hospital, Shooter's Hill, was opened for
the reception of patients. The Park Hospital, at Hither Green, will,
it is expected, be ready this Summer; and the Grove Hospital by the
Spring of next year (1898).
A convalescent hospital for about 700 patients is also to be erected
in the South of London, near Carshalton.
It is hoped that the provision of this additional accommodation will
be sufficient to ensure the prompt removal to hospital of all insufficiently
isolated cases of scarlet fever and diphtheria, and that this will lead during
the next few years to a reduction in the number of cases, and a
corresponding reduction in the annual mortality.
In several instances a mild case that had not been notified and
isolated was the cause of several other cases.
DIPHTHERIA.
During the year there were notified 67 cases of diphtheria and
membranous croup and 9 deaths. The Metropolitan Asylums Board
Hospitals were also sometimes full for diphtheria patients so that the
same difficulties were experienced as for scarlet fever cases.
As it is sometimes difficult or impossible for a medical practitioner to
be certain that a case of throat illness is diphtheria or not, I am glad
that your Board gave its consent to allow medical practitioners to have
a bacteriological examination made of the doubtful cases by the British
Institute of Preventive Medicine.
Our knowledge of the disease, and of the time when the patient
ceases to be a possible source of infection, has thereby been made much
more accurate.
The medical practitioner probably would not notify any such case
unless the bacteriological examination proved it to be diphtheria, and
cases that are not really diphtheritic would not be sent to hospital, nor
any further unnecessary preventive measures taken.
During the last half of year 17 doubtful cases have been examined.
In 10 of these the diphtheria bacillus was isolated, and in the other 7 it
was not.
The use of antitoxic serum in the treatment of diphtheria has again