3-034-687 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

A ward in the Hampstead Smallpox Hospital, [London], 1871. 'The daily papers have filled many of their columns...with the painful details of evidence taken in the inquiry ordered by the Local Government Board (lately styled the Poor-Law Board) into the charges made by several medical gentlemen against the management of this hospital...the Hampstead Smallpox Hospital is not, as has been supposed by many, what is known as a voluntary hospital. It is nothing more or less than a pauper institution. It is a temporary building, erected under the powers given to the Poor-Law Board...to meet the epidemic of last winter. The cost of its erection is defrayed out of the common poor fund of the metropolis...and the inmates received are paid for by the parishes which send them. The hospital is one of four fever and smallpox hospitals in the metropolis...[where] about 21,000 patients have been treated during the epidemic. [They] are admitted to the hospitals on the relieving officers' orders; and, though the patients are thus paupers, the parishes are entitled by law, if the persons are able to pay, to recover the cost of their keep in these asylums...We refrain at present from commenting on the facts disclosed in the inquiry, which is not yet concluded'. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.