View report page

92
The foregoing table and figures are taken from the report
of the Medical Superintendent of the Hospital.
An interlocutory injunction has been obtained in the Court
of Chancery, by a Mr. Chambers and others, restraining the
Metropolitan Asylum Board from receiving cases of small-pox
into this Hospital from any district lying beyond a mile radius
of the Hospital. The interpretation that was put upon the
meaning of the words of the injunction by the Counsel on both
sides, is that no case was to be received into the Hospital from
any house situated at a greater distance than one mile from the
Hospital. This excludes cases from being removed there from
some portions of this district. Your Board, after the injunction
was granted, was obliged to send all those cases that occurred
outside a mile radius of the Fulham Hospital to the Metropolitan
Asylum Small-pox Hospital at Stockwell. At the end
of last year the Metropolitan Asylum Board closed the Fulham
Hospital, having come to the decision that it was not worth
while to keep it open for the isolation of cases from so small
a portion of the Metropolis. It is not necessary for me here
to express my views on the question of the disease having been
propagated to the inhabitants of Fulham from the Hospital,
as your Board will shortly have the opportunity of reading
my evidence which I have given on the subject before the Royal
Hospitals Commission at the House of Commons.
Scarlet Fever.
During last year scarlet Fever was not so prevalent in London
as in the previous year. There were 2,108 deaths registered
against 3,073 in the year 1880. In the Fulham district
there was a greater number of cases reported last year than in
the year previous. The number of deaths registered last year
was 65 against 37 the previous year. Altogether last year there
were 228 cases reported, against 248, 180, and 152 reported
in the three years 1878, 1879 and 1880. These numbers do not
represent all the cases that occurred in the district, because a
very large proportion are treated at home and never reported to
your officers at all. Of the 228 cases reported last year there
were 140 in the parish of Hammersmith, against 85 in the previous
year, and 88 in the parish of Fulham, against 67 in the
previous year. Information of 58 cases were first obtained in
the death returns ; 92 cases were not reported till after the
recovery of the patients. Two cases were too bad to be removed.
In 29 cases the patients or their relatives refused to allow