of stricken families which only such diseases as
these yield in all their misery—it was painful to
think that a special hospital so needful above
others, should be absolutely threatened with
decay for want of funds. After the new hospital
was opened, there were several years during
which London was unusually free from fever,
and the full measure of its resources was not
tested. For the three years preceding the year
'fifty-six, the number of annual admissions rose
to the average of a few more than a thousand,
but in the year 'fifty-six the number suddenly
rose to one thousand seven hundred and sixty.
There were eight hundred less, in the year
following. A run of comparatively healthy years
has come again, and a great year of fever
epidemic also will come again as surely. The
fluctuations are incomprehensible. We only
know that typhus, typhoid, and malignant
scarlet fevers never are extinct, although
they are almost, if not quite, extinguishable;
and that the removal of cases to an airy fever
hospital not only may save the lives of those
who are nursed, but must prevent an
incalculable amount of suffering from the spread of
sickness and death. An ordinary case taken
into a general hospital is cured, and the
patient's life is given to his friends and the
community. But when an infectious fever case
is brought into the Fever Hospital and cured,
the saving is not only of that single life, but of
the lives of all to whom the infection might
have spread in the sick man's unhealthy home
or neighbourhood. Sudden and ruinous is the
devastation of disease like this; it is an especial
scourge of the poor. They who are smitten are,
like the plague-smitten of old, too liable to be
shunned by their fellows, and too many of them
are not at all desirable as inmates of a general
hospital, in which the greater part of the disease
is not infectious. Even the Fever Hospital is
dreaded by its neighbours. Why? When it was
a close house in a row, it communicated none
of its sickness to next door. How it is to hurt
anybody in Islington, now it is a wide airy
building, in an open space, one might be much
puzzled to discover. The vicar of the parish
has not dared to put a foot across its threshold.
Once, when a clergyman from another district
was procured, the vicar stood upon his
parochial rights and caused his ejection; but those
sacred rights he has, for all that, never himself
exercised. A substitute sent by him after he
had turned out the " interloper," took fright
and disappeared in a week. The Catholic priest
attends on the sick of his fold, faithful to his
trust; but our own Church in the Fever
Hospital leaves all its work to be done by the
half-lettered Scripture reader, or the City
missionary. There is no such lack of courage in
the officers and servants of the hospital, though
they have really a risk to run. In 'fifty-five, when
the cases admitted were unusually severe, though
not unusually numerous, twelve of these ministers
to the sick caught typhus fever, the resident
medical officer being himself among the
number; and out of the twelve three died.
Nobody flinched for that.

It is not only under this discouragement of
an unfounded cowardice among its neighbours,,
that the hospital suffers. It has made for itself
great opportunities of good, and done wonders
with little means. It has grown from the
private house with fifteen beds, a nurse or two, and
a maid-of-all-work, to be one of the best
appointed and most valuable hospitals in London.
But it has no more grants or compensation
windfalls to expect, and its yearly work now
costs it nearly a thousand pounds more than it
gets from the public, on whom solely it depends
for income. It has no sort of endowment, and
has for some years past met its expenses by a
draught upon its capital. Not long ago, it
contrived, and built, and paid for—partly by a
special subscription—an admirable ambulance for
the conveyance of patients, who had been too
often brought to the hospital in cabs. By this
conveyance, in which two patients can lie
recumbent, and two attendants can ride, the sick
person is conveyed from his own bed to the
hospital bed, without change of posture, and without
fatigue. It is thoroughly ventilated, and every
part is contrived to be washed and disinfected
after use. The governors have got the ambulance,
but to place it perfectly at the disposal of any
one requiring it, they need also a horse and a
man, and these cost more money than the present
small resources of the hospital enable them to
add to its expenses. The great difficulty is, and
has always been, the maintenance of a sufficient
body of staunch permanent subscribers. Money
in the lump is a good thing in its way, but the
life-blood of a hospital flows most safely through
its guinea and two guinea subscription-list,
when that is large, and steadily maintained.
And if the London Fever Hospital cannot secure
to itself such a list, in less than twenty years it
is to be feared that there will no longer be a
Fever Hospital in London.

NEW WORK
BY SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON.

NEXT WEEK
Will be continued (to be completed in six months)
A STRANGE STORY,
BY THE
AUTHOR OF "MY NOVEL," " RIENZI," &c. &c.

Now ready, in 3 vols. post 8vo,
SECOND EDITION of
GREAT EXPECTATIONS.
BY CHARLES DICKERS.

CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY.