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11
ask Her Majesty's Government to bring in a Bill for the
notification of the disease. Everyone in the present day
approves of and realizes the great advantage of the action
which was subsequently taken, but society did not then
seem to be roused at the state of affairs. In the present day
with such a mortality from smallpox, every newspaper in
the kingdom would be calling attention to the matter. I
remember a medical man making a formal complaint
against me to the Magistrate at the Hammersmith Police
Court because I had removed a patient to an isolation
hospital when suffering from smallpox, and had disinfected
the infected room. No medical man could be found in
the present day to disapprove of such a course. During
last year there was only one death from smallpox in
London.
Future generations will look back to the statistics of
the year 1898 and hardly believe it possible that 3069
deaths from measles should have occurred in the greatest
and richest city in the world, with practically no effort
being made by the Public Health Authorities to combat
with the evil. Everyone knows that the illnesses in the
greater majority of cases of measles are not of a serious
character, but the whole question is, is it not an imperative
duty that the disease should be made notifiable in order
that premises might be disinfected, and as far as possible
the disease prevented from spreading?
SCARLET FEVER.
Four hundred and fifty-eight cases were reported as
due to scarlet fever, against 399 in the previous year,
Two hundred and eighty-four cases reported last year
were isolated at Isolation Hospitals, 281 at the
Metropolitan Asylums Board's Western Fever Hospital,
and 3 at the London Fever Hospital at Islington; 174
cases were treated at the homes of the patients. The
mortality rate on the cases reported was 4.6 per cent.