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epidemic, unparalleled for extent and severity in the memory of any of
the existing race of medical practitioners. The reason seems to be that
there is just above the pauper class, for whom the Board was bound to
provide, a class of persons, artisans, shopmen, clerks, laundresses, petty
tradesmen, and such like, who, although never in the receipt of
parochial relief, have been driven to seek refuge in the Hospitals of the
Asylums' Board, when attacked with Small-pox. To have refused such
persons admission would have been to compromise one of the grand
objects with which theEe Hospitals were founded, namely the isolation,
not otherwise procurable, of cases of contagious disease. Such
persons when, as is commonly the case, occupying with their families a
single room of a house let in tenements, or only a portion of their own
house, while the remainder is let to other families, are as likely to
disseminate the contagion to those about them as a pauper would be
under similar circumstances. They have no convenience for isolating
themselves, and cannot afford the payment of three guineas demanded
at the Highgate Hospital, even supposing there were room to receive
them there. The occasion appears to me to be one on which local
supplemental action would be appropriate. Since March 13th arrangements
made by the Guardians for receiving Islington patients at the
Old Workhouse have been at an end, in consequence of the occupation
of the building by the Asylum Board for conversion into a Convalescent
Hospital; and no new local Hospital has been established, or so far as
T know contemplated. Yet one is needed, and, if the experience of
former epidemics is to be trusted, will be needed for some weeks and
perhaps some months to come, if only to receive the surplus cases,
willing and desirous of removal from home, which the Asylum Boards'
Hospitals cannot accommodate. There ought at any rate to be such
hospital accommodation available as would permit of my putting into
operation the 2Gth section of the Sanitary Act, 1866.
I should also mention another matter which is subject for regret,
namely, the greatly diminished number of persons now seeking revaccination;
a fact which is obvious to all our medical men engaged in
private practice, and demonstrable at every one of our public stations.
This is not because all who require it have been re-vaccinated—very
far from this—it is simply because the first panic has subsided, and
people have become accustomed to the presence in their midst of an
enemy who has hitherto spared them, and who, they hope, will continue
to overlook their unprotected condition. As fear subsides reason ought
to take its place. But perhaps this is too much to expect.