View report page

41
The medical officer of health of Kensington referring to the fact that 180 cases of erysipelas
were notified in that district, states that many of them were of traumatic origin, unimportant
in character, and such as the framers of the Act could scarcely have intended to be
notified. The medical officer of health of Lambeth writes that the advantages from the notification
of erysipelas are few, and that the majority of cases notified as erysipelas are not such as were
contemplated by the framers of the Notification Act.
With respect to hospital accommodation for cases of erysipelas, the medical officer of health
of Hampstead states that applications are from time to time made to him by medical practitioners
to remove cases of this disease, but at the present time the Metropolitan Asylums Board has no
power to receive these cases into their hospitals; that general hospitals will not receive them on
account of the risk of infection of surgical cases, and that there is objection to their removal to
the infirmary or any place in the vicinity of lying-in wards. The medical officer of health of
Battersea states that of the cases notified 22 were removed to hospital.
The medical officer of health of St. Pancras made inquiry of other London medical officers
of health as to the course adopted in their several districts in connection with the notification of
cases of erysipelas. He thus found that no action was taken in Marylebone, Mileend,
Woolwich, St. Giles, St. Pancras; that in Shoreditch, Chelsea, and St. Martinin-the-Fields
action was only taken in special cases. Of the other districts in
which action of some sort is taken, the sanitary authority does not disinfect
in Paddington, Clerkenwell, St. Luke, Bethnal-green, St. George-in-the-East, St.
Olave, Bermondsey, Wandsworth, and Lee. Disinfection is done on request, or after fatal or
exceptional cases in Kensington, St. George, Hanover-square, St. James, Westminster, Hampstead,
Stoke Newington, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Strand, Holborn, St. Saviour, Southwark, St.
George, Southwark, Newington, Camberwell, Greenwich, and Lewisliam. In other districts, viz.,
Hammersmith, Fulham, Westminster, Islington, Hackney, Whitechapel, Limehouse, Poplar,
Rotherliithe, Lambeth, Battersea, and Plumstead, it is the practice to disinfect as in other
diseases, but in Plumstead disinfection is not strictly enforced.
Puerperal Fever.
The deaths in the registration County of London in 1898 attributed to puerperal fever
numbered 184, the corrected annual average of the preceding ten years being 260.
The number of cases notified, and the number of deaths registered, in the registration
County of London since the year 1890 have been as follows—

In a few of the annual reports of medical officers of health mention is made of the steps
taken on receipt of a certificate notifying a case of puerperal fever. Thus the medical officer of
health of Kensington states that he has for a long time felt it to be his duty "to warn nurses, and
all other women concerned with these painful cases, of the responsibility they incur by attending
other parturient women until after a period of three or four weeks, and disinfection of their persons,
clothing, &c." The medical officer of health of Lambeth expresses the opinion that it is sufficient
1 See footnote (2), page 3.
[6]