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I have ventured thus to place on record a sketch of the Bteps which
have led up to our present more hopeful position; in the belief
that we are on the eve of great and beneficial changes, and that
your Vestry will have no cause to regret the part we have taken in
helping to bring about a satisfactory solution of one of the most
interesting problems that could be brought under the notice of
sanitary authorities, or with which sanitary officials have to deal.
Small-Pox.—History of the Epidemic.
Although the epidemic is not by any means over at the present
writing (August) we see, I believe, the beginning of the end in
the considerable decrease in the number of cases in the northern
parts of the parish. There was, it is true, a decided increase in
the number of fresh cases in June and July, in the south-western
corner of Brompton, but our success in isolating the sick led us to
entertain a hope, justified by the event, that the disease
would not spread as we should have expected it to do in more
crowded and poorer parts of the parish, such e.g. as Kensal New
Town, where much difficulty, from a variety of causes, has been experienced
in effecting the removal of the sick to the hospital. I
think the time has arrived, therefore, when the leading facts of the
epidemic, so far as they are known to us, may be stated—not that
I have much, if anything, new, to say on the subject, as I have
kept your Vestry regularly informed of its progress. The annual
report of the Medical Officer, however, being a permanent record,
it appears desirable to recapitulate herein whatever of interest
in a sanitary point of view may have happened, though dealt
with already, piecemeal, in my monthly reports.
Small-pox, then, began to spread epidemically in Kensington,
so far as we know (this reservation being necessary, owing to
the concealment of cases, always more common and more easy at
the commencement of an epidemic) in the late autumn of 1876. For
many months the disease was almost entirely confined to the northern
parts of the parish, and of these no section suffered so severely
as Kensal New Town. The portions of this district belonging to Paddington
and Chelsea appear to have been invaded in an equal degree.
The cases in the South Sanitary district, i.e., all Kensington south
of the Uxbridge Road, were few in number, and occurred sporadically
until June, 1877, when they increased considerably, why
orwherefore I am unable to say: but popular opinion ascribed the
spread of the disease to infection derived from the new hospital west
of the railway and cemetery at Brompton, between the Lillie Bridge
and London Athletic Club Grounds, an opinion in my judgment not
tenable. Some persons again, thought the disease might have
been spread by the clothes of the hospital nurses in their intercourse
with the outer world, but I have no reason to doubt that the
precautions taken to guard against this not impossible source of