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9
The question whether or not the Hospital has acted
injuriously on the district by assisting in the spread of
scarlet fever, not having been examined on the same plan
as that adopted for small-pox, I now proceed to lay before
you the results obtained by making a spot map, that is to
say, by laying down on a map the houses in which the disease
occurred, and indicating each by a spot. There is, I may say,
much greater difficulty in such an investigation than for smallpox,
unless we take the death returns only as a guide, viz.,
that I do not receive notice of an equal proportion of cases in
respectable houses as of small-pox cases, because the necessity
for effectual disinfection is not so generally admitted. The
reported cases which have chiefly occurred in the poorer streets
show that in 1886, within the ¼-mile radius of the centre of the
Hospital, residents in 44 houses out of 283 invaded in the whole
district were attacked, or 15.5 per cent of the cases, against
6.1 per cent. of houses in the whole district; between the
¼ and ½-mile radii there were 112 houses invaded, or 39.6 per
cent. amongst 15 per cent. of the total number of houses;
between the ½ and ¾-mile radii there were 35 and between the
¾ and 1-mile radii 31 houses invaded, making a total of 23.4
per cent. of cases amongst 31.5 per cent. of the total houses,
and outside the mile radius 61 houses were invaded, or 21.5
per cent. of all infected amongst 47.4 per cent. of the total
number of houses. These figures seem to show that the
Hospital had exerted an injurious effect on the population, but
the map shows that if so, it must have been by traffic, i.e., by
personal rather than aerial infection (as in the case of smallpox),
because the disease existed chiefly in the streets
used as approaches to the Hospital, whilst the houses in the
Clapton Park Estate near the Hospital were spared. Now,
as the inhabitants of this estate are mostly as poor as
the residents in the streets attacked, and their sanitary condition
about the same, any suspicion of aerial infection was
removed.