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50
can provide for the nurses would compensate for the loss of
liberty:" even the provision of a "recreation room" was
objected to.
So far I have referred to the nurses, wardswomen, &c., these
being naturally most nearly in contact with the sources of infection,
but there were abundant other means of personal
communication between the hospital and the district, viz: by
non-resident officers (5), by tradesmen, artizans (6), dustmen,
visitors, and callers (very numerous from infected localities,
and by ambulance divers; to all of which Mr. Power refers, but
without attributing to them any share in the causation of an
outburst of small-pox (Jan. 26-30, 1881), on which in considerable
measure his theory of aerial infection is based.*
It will naturally bo asked what evidence there is that
small-pox was spread by means of this excessive personal communication?
I can only reply that little such evidence was
obtained : much mischief, however, may have been done, and no
one the wiser. The following case was suspicious:—The fiancee of
a male servant at the hospital contracted small-pox; she had never
gone within the hospital gates. I strongly suspected she had
received infection through the man, but of course it could not be
proved. Moreover, as she lived not more than a quarter of a
mile from the hospital, her case might equally, in Mr, Power's
view, be cited as an instance of spread by dissemination, but
that it occurred in July; and, as Dr. Burdon Sanderson put it to
me (question 4818), "no one suggests that the spread of smallpox
after an outbreak has commenced is dependent upon
atmospheric influence." Again, what suspicions does not a case
like the following suggest? A medical man, whose servant was
admitted into the hospital in January, stated that she informed
him, that her nurse, who went to evening parties, had made up
bows for her dancing shoes, while sitting at her bedside, and
that before going to bed on her return, she used to come into
*Mr. Power speaks of "some 70 occasions day by day of communication
between the hospital and the district," but deems only one in six or eight of
such occasions " worth consideration."