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70
ment Act, 1876, declaring the Managers' Hospitals to be within
a convenient distance of any of the sanitary districts in the
Metropolis for the purpose of the section first cited. Upon the
issue of such an Order every hospital named therein "shall be
deemed to be within the district" of the named Sanitary
Authority. The Board have not issued an Order hitherto, but
it is desirable that such an Order should be issued (although
the occasions are few on which it is found necessary to exercise
the compulsory powers of removal), seeing that the hospitals
are only six in number, while the Sanitary Districts are forty.
Certain of the Sanitary Authorities whose districts are more or
less remote from the hospitals, having made application to the
Board to issue an Order, their communications were referred by
the Board to the Asylums Board for "any observations that the
Managers may desire to offer upon this question." The
Managers having considered the question stated that they "had
no observations to offer . . . . although they would be prepared
to carry out any instructions which the Local Government
Board may issue in reference to the section of the Act referred
to"—an important proviso, seeing that before any person can
be removed to a "hospital for the reception of the sick" by
justice's order, "the consent of the superintending body of such
hospital " must be obtained.
SMALL-POX HOSPITAL ACCOMMODATION.
The Royal Commission (of 1882), in one of their "practical
recommendations," proposed that provision should be made of
sites and buildings which could without difficulty be made capable
of receiving 2,100, or by special exertion, 2,700, small-pox
patients. The actual accommodation falls very far below the
smaller of these totals, consisting as it does of some 400 beds at
the Hospital Ships, and 60 beds, in all, at three London
Hospitals, to which Ambulance Stations are attached—beds for
exceptional patients, and which the Asylums Board will not
suffer to be occupied except in case of urgent necessity. But