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11
With reference to the place into which fever cases are taken for treatment,
it has been observed that 27 deaths from fever occurred in the Workhouse,
and 7 in various neighbouring Hospitals—none in the London Fever
Hospital, the establishment specially devoted to the care of this class of diseases.
It is within the province of this report to point out that there is much
danger in treating tvphus cases in Infirmaries and Workhouses where patients
are received suffering from other diseases, and in which the staff of the
establishment is not acclimatized to fever. In the Workhouse of St. Giles
and in at least one of the general Hospitals into which our patients were
received, typhus in 18C2 spread to other inmates in a serious degree. ^ hat
most concerns our own district is, that in the Workhouse of St. Giles' seven
inmates died of this fever, being a, quarter of the whole number of typhus
deaths that occurred in the Infirmary. The seven deaths were mostly among
imbecile or infirm persons. This spread of typhus is not peculiar to our
Workhouse, but represents very closely the degree to which the disease
habitually spreads if it is treated in the same wards with other diseases.* On
the other hand, in the London Fever Hospital, in the same epidemic, the deaths
among the persons vho caught the fever in the wards was only one in 37 of
the whole number of deaths. It is much to be hoped that, if fever should
continue in our district, the experience of the past year may induce the adoption
of a system of rigorous isolation for all cases of contagious tyjiiius.

* Thus six general Hospitals of London into which typhus patients were admitted
in 1862, and when the spread of the disease was investigated by Dr. Murchison, it was
found that 21 out of 80 deaths from this fever were in nurses or other patients in proximity
to the sick.
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