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as much as 2/- a week and brings up the rents of old property
almost to the level of the new. The tenant consequently is
obliged to take in lodgers to make up the difference in his
rent, and you have to pay for more patients at the Isolation
Hospital from overcrowded tenements.
Notable features in the cases recorded this year are six
cases notified when desquamating? No further cases were
traced to these. There were seven family outbreaks with
twenty-one cases. In each of these the patients were nearly
always notified together. There were also nine cases in
young people mostly travelling to their work at a distance.
One case occurred in the K.V.H. and was removed to her
own home without accident. One case occurred in a house
where boys were received for change of air. There was
some history of a rash in one of their visitors, but no signs
of discharges or desquamation. One fatal case in a delicate
girl of 15. One child with severe hip disease died in hospital.
DIPHTHERIA.
28 cases and 5 deaths.
In four or five cases there were slight sanitary defects in
the house, but most of the patients were young children,
rarely leaving the house. The cases usually were described
as beginning with a cold. One fatal case occurred in a
breast-fed baby. Three cases were traced as coming from
places where diphtheria was prevalent. In one case notified
on the 1st of January, 1907, the mother had taken the child
to London to a hospital the day before. The officials at the
hospital were not certain of the diagnosis, but took a swabbing
from the throat and sent the child back to Kingston.
The diphtheria bacillus was isolated the next day and the
case notified.
There is a growing practice, doubtless extending to other
suburbs, of parents taking children to London hospitals instead
of consulting local medical men. The workman's ticket
is only 7d. by workmen's train in the early morning, but the
parent loses a day's work, and the child runs great personal
risk, as well as in infectious cases causing infection to spread to