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practically worthless as a standard for comparison with other districts
or with the country generally. For instance, the difference between
my death-rate and that of the Registrar-General arises not only from
a different estimate of population, but also from the fact that while he
records 465 deaths from Diarrhoea during the year in West Ham, I
have tabulated 730 deaths as being of sufficiently suspicious character
to warrant their being included under the head of Epidemic Diarrhoea.
Small-pox.—Only two cases of Small-pox occurred during the
year. These were a husband and wife living in Croydon Road, who
contracted their illness in February, by visiting a friend at Buckhurst
Hill, while he was suffering from the disease, he having recently
arrived from Marseilles, where he in all probability acquired the
contagion. The West Ham cases were removed to the Hospital Ships
of the Metropolitan Asylums Board, and returned home well in due
course. Owing to the subsequent completion of our own Dagenham
Small-pox Hospital, these were probably the last cases that we shall
need to send to the Hospital Ships for many years. At the same
time, it is fitting to record that the agreement entered into by the
Town Clerk in 1894, on behalf of the Council, with the Metropolitan
Asylums Board, by which the latter body undertook to receive our
cases for reasonable consideration, pending the erection of our own
hospital, proved to be of the greatest value to the Borough.
Altogether, during the period from April, 1894, to February
25th, 1899, 323 cases were sent to the Ships of the Board, of whom
23 died. The total cost to the Borough was £3,276 19s. 4d , say
£10 each case ; but the value of prompt removal is scarcely reducible
to the figures of a money column, and although the Small-pox Committee
of the Board frankly admitted at the time that in adopting the
proposed course, they were more concerned in protecting London than
in conferring benefits upon West Ham, the fact remains that the
Borough did obtain, both in the feeling of- security from, and in the
administrative control of, the virulent contagion of Small-pox, considerable
benefit by the arrangement above mentioned.