View report page

37
THE PREVENTION AND TREATMENT OF CONSUMPTION.
Matters relating to the prevention and treatment of consumption continue to engage public
and medical attention in a high degree. The National Association for the Prevention of Consumption
and other forms of Tuberculosis continues its beneficent work of diffusing information as
to the nature and cause of the disease, and the measures necessary for its prevention and cure, and
in many parts of the country sanatoria for open-air treatment have been established. The Kensington
Sanitary Authority have since the establishment of the Association taken keen interest in its objects,
as testified by the many references to the subject in my reports, from the first of them in 1899.
In that year, in a draft report prepared for the Sub-committee of the Sanitary Committee of
the late Vestry, appointed to consider the subject, I recommended among other means for
the prevention and cure of consumption, the "provision of a hospital or hospitals, or other
arrangements to enable poor consumptive persons to be isolated and treated under the best
attainable conditions." Power in this respect is given by Section 75 of the Public Health Act, 1891,
which reads:—
(1) Any sanitary authority may provide for the use of the inhabitants of their district,
hospitals, temporary or permanent, and for that purpose may—
(a) Themselves build such hospitals, or
(b) Contract for the use of any hospital or part of a hospital, or
(c) Enter into any agreement with any person having the management of any hospital
for the reception of the sick inhabitants of their district, on payment of such
annual or other sum as may be agreed upon.
(2) Two or more sanitary authorities may combine in providing a common hospital.
The report of the Sub-committee, as modified by the Committee, having been adopted, and
referred back for the preparation of a "detailed scheme for giving effect to the suggestions embodied
therein," I advised the preparation and circulation of an instructional leaflet; voluntary notification,
disinfection of infected houses, and enforcement of the law for the prevention of overcrowding, and
the abatement of other nuisances, with a view to secure healthy homes for the working classes.
The leaflet was prepared and circulated but no other action was taken.
In the first report in 1900, the subject was again dealt with. The Local Government Board
had refused an application by the Kensington Guardians for authority to provide additional
accommodation at the workhouse, there being already a sufficient number of persons housed on the
site; and as the needed accommodation could have been obtained by removal of consumptive
inmates to a separate establishment in the country, I called the attention of the Guardians to the
action taken by certain provincial Boards "to secure separation of consumptives from other sick
persons," and recommended that, alone or in combination with other Poor Law Authorities, they
should adopt this plan. Subsequently the Guardians fitted up and set apart a sunny south ward,
containing 24 beds, for the treatment of tuberculous women and children, which was brought into
use in November, 1900. In July, 1901, a ward for men was opened, but proving inadequate for the
number in need of isolation and treatment, the Guardians decided to allocate two wards, with accommodation
for forty persons, in the new infirmary, for the separate classification and treatment of this
class of patients.
In 1901 certain communications on the prevention of consumption addressed to the Council
were referred by the Public Health Committee to a Sub-committee, whose report, unanimously
adopted by the Committee and by the Council, was printed in my annual report for that year
(page 39).
The Committee recited the recommendations of the Congress on Tuberculosis, held in 1901,
as follows:—
(1) Voluntary notification of cases of consumption attended with tuberculous expectoration—
the main agent for the conveyance of tuberculosis from man to man;
(2) The supply to consumptives, by hospitals and dispensaries, of pocket spittoons, with a
view to the suppression of the dangerous habit of indiscriminate spitting;
(3) The supply to consumptives, by these institutions, of printed instructions with regard to
the prevention of consumption;
(4) The provision of sanatoria as an indispensable part of the measures necessary for the
diminution of tuberculosis; and
(5) The provision of anti-tubercular dispensaries, as the best means of checking tubercular
disease among the industrial and indigent classes.