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119
excellent management both in the Small-pox
Hospital at Highgate and in the London Fever
Hospital at Islington. We do not doubt that
both these institutions have done excellent
service to the public by their care of the sick
and in diminishing the risks of infection by
taking many from houses in which they could
not be duly isolated. But we think it very
doubtful whether the establishment of other
hospitals of the same kind, either as charitable
institutions or as places of reception for those
who can pay, should be allowed unless they
are to be subject to the general but effective
supervision of the sanitary authority.
"The foregoing suggestions are calculated
to meet in some degree the intermittent character
of small-pox visitations. If the hospital
authorities had only to do with small-pox, they
would have to collect a staff on occasion of
each epidemic, and, if they did not wish to
retain it in idleness, to break it up when the
epidemic was passed, just as it had effectually
learnt its work. The experienced officers being
thus in a great measure lost, a fresh, and, from
the nature of the case, a less perfect machinery