View report page

48
So much for the doings of the Sanitary Authorities acting
in concert. Your Vestry's proceedings in the matter take precedence
in point of time, dating from receipt of a circular letter
from the Local Government Board (2nd January, 1877), in
which the several Authorities were urged to provide hospital
accommodation for the non-pauper sick under the 37th section of
the Sanitary Act, 1866. Your Special Purposes Committee
presented a report on this letter, 17th January, 1877, submitting
"that it is inexpedient and unnecessary for the Vestry to
provide hospital accommodation, seeing that the whole of the cases
can be so easily dealt with by extending the powers of the
Metropolitan Asylums Board, so as to enable them to provide
for all persons in the Metropolis suffering from small-pox or
other infectious disease, and requiring isolation in hospitals.".
Upon consideration of the February communication from the
Asylums Board, your Vestry concurred in the conclusions (a)
(b) (c) above quoted, but further urged "that the expenses of
persons not being paupers, admitted into the hospitals upon the
recommendation of Vestries and District Boards, should be
defrayed out of a Metropolitan Rate or Common Fund."
My own views were fully set out in a report to your Vestry,
dated January 10th, 1877, and in a subsequent communication to
the Managers. They were to the effect that the Managers should
" go on as heretofore providing accommodation for all comers
that the cost of patients admitted upon the application of the
Nuisance Authority should be borne by a Metropolitan Rate or
Common Fund, and that relief in hospitals should be placed upon
the same footing as public vaccination—i.e., should not pauperise.
If these conditions were not admissible, I said that I would prefer
" severance of the connection between poor-law administration
and the hospital treatment of infectious diseases, by the constitution
of a Central Authority (on the plan of the Metropolitan
Board of Works), to be elected by the Vestries and District
Boards of Works, and having power to provide accommodation
for all persons whose isolation in hospitals is necessary for