Tenth annual report of the Local Government Board, 1880-1881. Supplement containing report and papers submitted by the Board's Medical Officer on the use and influence of hospitals for infectious diseases.

Date:
[1901]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Tenth annual report of the Local Government Board, 1880-1881. Supplement containing report and papers submitted by the Board's Medical Officer on the use and influence of hospitals for infectious diseases. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The number of Joint Hospital Boards, which was 32 in 1892, has increased to 51 at the end'of 1900. A number of Joint Hospital Committees have also been formed by orders of County Councils under the Isolation Hospitals Act, 1893, and other districts have combined in a less formal manner, or have entered into agreements for the use of the hospitals be- longing to neighbouring districts. Since the date of Sir 1C Thorne's Report there have been very few instances in which an isolation hospital for the use of the inhabitants of the district in general has been established and maintained otherwise than by a sanitary authority or combina- tion of authorities; though there have been some cases in which an isolation hospital has been erected by a private benefactor, or as a memorial, and afterwards handed over to the sanitary authority to be maintained by them. Moreover, the hospitals at Bradford, Dover, and Leeds, and the Monsall Hospital at Man- chester, which at the time of the Report were not in the hands of the respective Corporations, have since been transferred to them. The practice of receiving infectious cases at general hospitals has also declined in recent decades; though enteric fever is still frequently treated in general hospitals, and diphtheria occa- sionally, especially cases requiring operation; but few, if any, general hospitals now receive cases of scarlet fever, and none receive small-pox patients. The danger of the spread of small-pox in the neighbour- hood of hospitals in which patients suffering from that disease are aggregated, which Sir R. Thorne had in two instances found reason to suspect, and which was fully illustrated by the report in the same volume “ On the Influence of the Fulham Small-pox Hospital on the neighbourhood surrounding it,” has since been exemplified by the further observations on the influence of the Fulham Hospital published in the Annual Report of the Medical Officer of the Local Government Board for 1884, and by experience during epidemics of small-pox at Sheffield, Bradford, War- rington, Leicester, Gloucester, and elsewhere. On the other hand in London the removal of small-pox cases to hospitals at a distance, instead of treating them in hospitals within Ihe metropolitan limits, has been followed by a remarkable diminution in the prevalence of the disease. In the years following the great epidemic of 1871 until 1885 minor epi- demics recurred in London about every four years; but since 188(i, the year in which the treatment of small-pox in hospitals within the limits of the Metropolis was discontinued, the London death-rate from that disease (including the deaths from small- pox of Londoners in the hospitals outside the Metropolis) has declined almost to a vanishing point.