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conveyance of infection indirectly, e.g., in the clothing of the
officers, or of the visitors to the sick ; or even by the want of
proper care on the part of the drivers of the ambulances, or the
attendants on the sick en route, must, one would think, be obvious;
and it speaks well for the success of the precautionary measures
taken to avoid these sources of danger that they have scarcely been
noticed even by those who are most hostile to this particular
hospital, and who, it may be inferred, would have called attention
to them had they possessed any information on which to
found a charge. But such has not been the case; and the
only charge brought against the hospital is that it has been the
direct means of spreading the disease by coniagium carried across
hundreds of yards of open spaces to the streets nearest the
building—nearest, that is, in Kensington and Chelsea; for strange
to say the disease, according to the evidence of my colleague, the
Medical Officer of Health for Fulham, has been almost entirely
absent from the district immediately contiguous to the hospital,
the supposed centre of infection. Those who know how limited
is the area of infection even in small-pox, would scarcely have
conceived the possibility of such a theory being put forward in
respect of the Fulham Hospital, seeing that on three sides it is
far distant from inhabited houses, whatever suspicions might
have been more or less reasonably entertained in respect of other
hospitals less favourably situated. But even in respect of other
hospitals I have not been able to obtain any reliable evidence
against them; and surely this is a case in which the onus probandi
rests with the accusers. With reference to the Fulham
Hospital, I have entered so fully, in some of my Monthly
Reports,* into the inquiry suggested by the suspicions referred to,
that I do not feel it necessary at the present time to travel over
the ground again, having, in the judgment of competent authorities,
not merely demonstrated the want of evidence in support of the
assertions on which the hospital theory of infection has been
founded, but also shown the improbability of the hospital ever
becoming a source of direct infection to the neighbourhood.
It may be stated that the maximum number of Brompton
cases of small-pox occurred both in 1877 and in 1878, at the
periods of the greatest prevalence of the disease in the Metropolis
generally, and that the supposed relation between these maxima,
and the reception of acute cases of the disease at the hospital
was founded on imperfect information. The Brompton outbreaks
did not commence till long after the hospital had begun to receive
acute cases, and they terminated in both years long before the
hospital, owing to the decline of the epidemic, had ceased to
receive this class of cases.
*No. 9, 1877 (pawe 46), and No. 5,1878 (page 31), &c.; and a Special Report on
the subject, No. 7, 1878.