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11
Small Pox, she was not under any medical supervision and two
of her sisters were occupying the same bedroom at night and in
the daytime were at business in the City. After some difficulty
the patient was removed to the hospital and the house
disinfected.
I feel sure, had not energetic measures been adopted in this
locality there would have been a much more serious epidemic.
A number of other cases that occurred in our district were
casuals coming from various parts of the country and other
districts in London. In addition to those named we had six
cases that there was no question to their having brought the
disease from other localities, the remainder of the cases were
not confined to one particular part of the Hamlet, but occurred
in sporadic form all over the district. Each case was visited
and special precautions were taken in each instance to prevent
as far as possible the further spread of the disease. Out of the
116 cases 100 were removed to the hospital ships.
We may fairly claim that the various precautions that were
taken were the means of checking its spread, as with the exception
of the Old Church Road cases the disease never assumed
epidemic form, and I venture to say that had we been made
aware in the first instance of the persons that were treated as
Chicken Pox but which I have previously stated were Small
Pox a number of the subsequent cases would never have
occurred. I endeavoured to ascertain in each particular instance
if vaccination had been carried out; where the patients were
children, I had not much difficulty but with regard to the adults
the information was not at all reliable. In the thirty-five cases
under twelve years I found that twenty of these were unvaccinated,
ten were vaccinated, and five there was some doubt
about.
The mortality from this disease was very small, and no doubt
was due in the first instance to the majority of the cases being
of a mild character, and also to the perfect isolation and treatment
they received at the Asylums Board Hospital. Out of
116 persons who contracted the disease there were only eight
deaths, five of which were unvaccinated.
SCARLET FEVER.
As will be seen by the Charts this disease was very prevalent
during the whole of the year, the cause of this in a great
measure being, that in a large majority of the cases the disease
was of such a mild type that proper isolation was not
practised for sufficiently long periods, and so the children who
had partially recovered were allowed to mix with the rest of
the family; in all the cases brought to our knowledge means
was taken to insure isolation, and as will be seen from another part
of this report a large number of them were removed to the Asylums
Board Hospitals; the epidemic was not confined to our own