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Section 9.—The Public Medical Institutions of St. Giles, constitute the
last point on which I have to dwell, in the enumeration of its social peculiarities.
The absence of hospital accommodation in St. Giles, has been several times
adverted to, and the results of this deficiency have been incidentally noticed. It remains
to be stated that St. Giles is indebted to every one of its neighbours, and even
to some distant districts, for the reception of its suffering poor. Every hospital at
which I have made enquiries, have exhibited some deaths among persons brought from
St. Giles; it follows therefore that cases of disease must have been still more numerous.
In an appendix to this report will be found a table showing the deaths of St.
Giles inhabitants, which occurred in each hospital in the year 1857. Here it may be
stated, that the largest numbers appear to have been taken to King's College
Hospital, the Middlesex and Charing Cross Hospitals, University College Hospital,
and the Hospital for Sick Children—in this order. The Fever Hospital receives only a
stray patient or two from St. Giles, the poor who are affected with this disease are not
systematically transferred thither as from other districts.*
The Lying-in Hospital, in Endell Street, has received, of late years, about
100-200 patients yearly; they are not of a class of great importance to the Officer of
Health, except in the effect on the children in the birth-rate, and this has been sufficiently
noticed. The small mortality—four children and one mother, in 1857—is not
enough to disturb the death-rate of the locality.
The other medical institution of St. Giles, is the Bloomsbury Dispensary,
which relieves between two and three thousand patients annually, besides numbers who
are vaccinated, and receive treatment for slighter ailments by the House Surgeon.
A considerable majority of these patients are residents in the district; those that
require it—about a fourth or a fifth of the whole—receive attention at their own homes.
The well-kept records of the dispensary are consulted every week by the Officer of
Health, and give most important information as to the existence of disease among
persons a grade higher than the workhouse patients. In round numbers, 60 or 70
patients of the dispensary die every year, but their deaths are registered at the homes
of the patients.
There is another dispensary which affords relief to a considerable number of
poor persons, in connexion with the Ragged Schools in Brewer's Court, Great Wild
Street. There are sometimes 40 or 50 attendants here in the day; no register of the
cases is kept.
The St. Giles poor also receive medical assistance from some dispensaries
outside the district, especially those of the southern part from the Carey Street
Dispensary.
I have some interest in enquiring whether all the children born in St. Giles
are vaccinated in accordance with the provisions of the Compulsory Vaccination Acts.
Statistics on this point are fallacious, as the certificate of vaccination is ordered (1G &
17 Vict., c. 100, sec. 4) to be sent to the Registrar of the district in which the
* At the Royal Westminster Ophthalmic Hospital, Charing Cross, were relieved and
discharged 426 patients belonging to St. Giles's and 92 belonging to St. George's Bloomsbury,
in 1856, this is about the average of years.