between its back-windows and the church of St.
George's-in-the-East, Ratcliffe-highway. The
whole town district of the New Commercial-
road being then in the future, while beyond
the opposite houses and short streets, in the
broad Whitechapel-road, there were field-paths
to Bethnal-Green. In Constitution-row, then
opposite fields, although number two of a row
and in contact with houses on each side, the
forty-six pound house was rented, and fitted up
as a house of recovery: to the great horror of its
neighbours, who threatened indictment, and
prepared for litigation. Of course they had no case
until the nuisance was established and proved;
experience elsewhere had shown that the
existence of a house for the reception of malignant
fever cases is especially beneficial to the
district in which it is situated, since by offering
its handy and ready help it diminishes the
risk of infection there, more than elsewhere.
Reassuring medical opinions were obtained and
published, there was a printing committee
formed to superintend the diffusion of means
for a right understanding of the new establishment,
and the opening of the House of Recovery
resolved upon, at a half-yearly meeting,
called by advertisement—not where we should
look for such advertisement, in the Times, for
the Times was not then advertiser-general for
England, but in the True Briton, the Porcupine,
and the Morning Chronicle.

All this was the work of foundation done in
the year eighteen hundred and one. At the
beginning of the next year, the House of Recovery
was opened. But the dread of infection
worked within its walls as well as outside. The
first apothecary who was appointed, at a salary of
thirty pounds, declined to serve. The first porter
soon decamped. The first matron died within
a year, but not of fever. The first physician,
brave young Doctor Murray, who had flinched
from nothing, and who had done everything that
his hand could find to do, died also within the
year—of fever caught among the wretchedness
of a fever-smitten house in Stonecutter's-alley,
Lincoln's Inn-fields, that he was cleansing of
its sores. Father, mother, and child, had been
struck down in that house, but they were
removed to the House of Recovery and cured.
The institution gave a silver urn, with an
inscription in the doctor's honour engraved on it,
to his mother. He was one of thousands who
have died and who die every year in this great
town, the death that good and wise men do not
fear to meet, in the sacred service of their
fellows

In those old days, beside the matron and the
nurses in the house (of which the full accommodation
was of fifteen iron bedsteads for the sick
and three for nurses), there was a maid-of-all-
work, Martha Hill, giving her heart to a place
that was no sinecure for her, at wages of six
pounds a year. When a man calling himself
Hugh Loftus having got admission to the
premises, assaulted the matron, broke the windows,
and ran out, Martha ran after him all the way
to Battle-bridge, and seizing him by the collar,
gave him up to justice. She had a stout heart,
or she would not have served as six-pound maid-
of-all-work in a fever house.

Perhaps we linger too long over these old
days, but it is pleasant to speak of the beginnings
of good things. When in July, eighteen
hundred and two, Cripplegate parish clothed
two children who were returned cured from the
House of Recovery, but whose infected clothes
had been destroyed, the first movement was
made by the parishes in recognition of the value
of the fever institution to themselves. Very
soon afterwards, St. Clement Danes leading the
way with a vote of twenty guineas a year, offers
were made of contribution from the parishes
towards the cost of fever cases sent from them;
but St. Giles's at first not only refused to
contribute to the care of its sick cherished in the
fever-house, but would not even bury its dead
in a fatal case—the parish officers provoking a
remonstrance from the fever institution by telling
its inspector that "where the tree had fallen
it might lie." The first movement in the right
direction was made in the same month by St.
Andrew's, for, upon its being then represented
to the "governors and directors" of lhat parish
that twenty-five cases of malignant fever had
been brought into the House of Recovery
within a year from a single court in their district
—Spread Eagle-court, Gray's Inn-lane—they
themselves set about the purification with a
good will; and soon afterwards a vote for the
payment of two guineas with each pauper of
theirs taken into the Fever House was passed by
the overseers and ancients within the Liberty of
the Rolls. Meantime, much good had been done
by a parochial fever house established by the
vestry of St. Pancras, while the general institution
was in course of formation. The
prevalence of typhus in that parish was decidedly
abated.

The "Institution for the Cure and Prevention
of Contagious Fevers" was now fairly launched.
Subscriptions came in, already some money was
paid under a will, and three thousand pounds of
Consols could be bought, which in the year
eighteen hundred and two, after eight years of
war, were, thanks to Bonaparte, to be had for
less than two thousand pounds. One of the
early purchases made by the institution was,
even of Consols, below sixty. Between
February, eighteen hundred and two, when the
House of Recovery was opened, and the middle
of eighteen hundred and four, when there was
discussion of a government grant of three
thousand pounds to the new Fever Institution,
five hundred and fifty cases of typhus fever had
been received into it. In the last-named year
a petition was addressed to the House of Commons
for parliamentary aid towards checking
the prevalence of infectious fevers in London,
signed by the Duke of Somerset, the Bishop of
Durham, Mr. Wilberforce, Mr. Vansittart, and
Mr. Bernard, members of the Society for
Bettering the Condition of the Poor, and also of
the Fever Institution, which that society had
originally suggested and set in action. The