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Infirmary alike, the kitchen for the Infirmary only. Mess rooms
and dormitories for the female staff will be provided by adaptation
of existing buildings, which will, with slight alteration,
afford similar accommodation for the laundry staff; other
buildings, after removal, being set apart for the use of the
kitchen staff, nurses, and ward servants. Numerous other
reconstructions and adaptations are also contemplated—all of
which are set out in the architects' report—the cost being
included in the above estimate.
When the new hospital shall have been constructed, the
available accommodation will provide—in town, on the river,
and at Darenth—for some 1,200 patients, or less than half
the maximum indicated by the Royal Commission. But huts
can be rapidly extemporised to any required extent in case of
emergency. Moreover, it may be anticipated, as the Managers
will remove every small-pox patient out of London, when
removal can be effected with safety—and, happily, this is usually
the case—that hospital accommodation in the future will not be
required to the amount provided during recent epidemics.
The Hospital Ships.—A proposal was pressed upon the
Asylums Board, notably by the Islington Board of Guardians,
and supported by a section of the Managers who had warrant
for their proceedings in advice tendered by the Local
Government Board, to close the Hospital Ships, the Guardians
believing that money would be saved if the sporadic
cases of small-pox, which occur between epidemic periods,
were treated in the London Hospitals, instead of being
taken down the river. The money saving would not be considerable
in any case, and certainly not so large as has been
supposed, for it would be necessary to make provision at three
hospitals (the Eastern, the South-Eastern, and the Western), for
the reception of sporadic cases of small-pox, and it is not probable
that the expense of maintaining the necessary staff, for the
male and female wards, in these hospitals, would fall far short of
the cost of maintaining the ships in a state of constant readiness,
now that the expenditure of the Managers appears to be governed
by strict economy. It has to be remembered, moreover, that on
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