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15
FULHAM HOSPITAL.
About 139 cases of small-pox were removed to the hospitals of
the Managers of the Metropolitan Asylum's Board during the
year, of which 5 went to Hampstead, 2 to Stockwell, and 132 to
Fulham. The question, Whether the latter hospital is a source of
direct infection, and, therefore, a danger to the locality in which it is
situated? has from time to time been debated as warmly as ever.
I say "from time to time," because when an outbreak of small-pox
occurs in the district the question is debated: and when the disease is
absent from the district nothing is heard about the matter, though
the hospital may have been steadily continuing its career of usefulness.
Debated, moreover, I am bound to add, without any evidence having
as yet been produced to support the indictment against the hospital,
and without any reference to the value of the hospital as a place of
safe isolation for the sick. "There are cases of small-pox in the
district the origin of which we don't know: there is a small pox
hospital not half-a-mile away: therefore the spread of the disease
must be due to the hospital;"—is a not unfair exposition of the
"reasoning" on which the hospital has been condemned (in all
sincerity I believe) by many persons. But the mode of spread of
the disease is not often mysterious to those who, being brought daily
into contact with the sick, have opportunities of tracing cases to
their origin; and although cases have occurred of which the origin has
not been traced, the cases are so numerous in which the course of
infection has been tracked, from house to house, to the primary case in
a given group, as to satisfy well-informed persons that the comparatively
few cases in which the source of infection has not been
traced would, in all probability, if the facts were known, admit of an
equally rational explanation. Speaking from experience, I am able
to say that it is often a difficult matter to extract the truth with
respect to the previous movements of the sufferers. Actual untruth
in some cases, a withholding of facts in others, is too common. In
many a case where the Sanitary Inspector, under the heading
in his report book, "supposed origin of the infection," has been
obliged to write "unknown," the apparent mystery has received
quick and satisfactory solution as the result of enquiries made under
more favourable circumstances in the hospital itself. The able and