disease that smites the poor and ignorant for
neglects of the rich, who should be also the
wise. But it punishes the rich too, when,
from the overcrowded and unclean homes of
ill-fed sufferers, Pestilence stalks, clothed in his
own purple of the poisoned life-blood of man,
into the homes of those who wear fine linen and
fare sumptuously every day. The uninvited
guest so comes to them, when they sit, it may
be, at the Christmas feast, and lays a yellow
hand upon the child who is the hope of a happy
house, turning its delightful prattle into hard
and eager ravings of delirium, drawing the
rough black line upon the rosy lips, putting the
stare of anxious pain into the eye that was
brimful of laughter, and the twitch of bony
little fingers in place of the plump caressing
hand. Ah! the grief of the poor mother who
has few of this world's joys, whose Christmas,
at the merriest, is but a hungry one, when her
heart also is set hungering and aching for the
life of her child down with the fever. The
wail of the children and the silent care of the
man when it is the mother who lies talking
wildly on the bed of pain! But if the
breadwinner himself is down with fever, and has
nothing to give but infection of the terrible
disease, how great is the poor household's need of
a protecting care? At the present happy
holiday-time at which we write, there are two hundred
and thirty patients in the London Fever Hospital.
Some convalescent are about to return to the
homes that, for their absence, have drooped
more than ever into want and suffering. Some
in their wild delirium know neither where they
are nor what they suffer. But, well cared for
and well fed, well supplied with brandy and
wine, there is hope for most of them. It used
to be said, "feed a cold and starve a fever."
They will tell you differently about fever at the
Fever Hospital.

There are very, very few forms of disease in
which the question how to feed is not of more
positive importance than the question how to
physic. All cures are by the healthy operation
of the natural forces marvellously devised by
almighty wisdom for the sustenance of the body.
Our food is the raw material they work with.
Let them have a sufficient quantity of that, and
they may be trusted to work marvels. Deprive
them of that, in the belief that drugs are a
sufficient substitute, and you are making the
spade that digs their grave. Whatever the
disease, the patient must be fed ; and that, too,
with more natural victual than can be supplied
out of an apothecary's shop. To know how in
each case to supply the always indispensable
food in the most suitable and nutritive form, is
the best half of the sound practice of physic.
The administering of medicine is in many
diseases quite unnecessary, though in some
most valuable, and is a supplementary duty
only well fulfilled by the practitioner who
understands clearly that every grain or drop of a
drug that is not wanted, is only so much
hindrance to swift and complete recovery. The
patients in the Fever Hospital, the greater
number of them suffering from the typhus or
typhoid fever that want breeds, need above all
things nourishing and stimulating food, and this
they get.

But whence? The institution is wholly without
endowment. Its support by subscriptions is
hardly sufficient to keep it ready for its work in
healthy seasons; when, therefore, the time of
epidemic comes, the need is great for special
help from a new body of supporters. During
the past year the good service demanded of the
hospital, and done by it, has been of unexampled
magnitude. In the years eighteen hundred and
sixty and sixty-one, the number of patients
received into the London Fever Hospital were
three hundred and ninety-one, and six hundred
and forty-six. In the next following year the
number admitted was two thousand six hundred
and ninety-nine, the greatest number received
in any year until that year 'sixty-four, which
has now passed from us; the number of fever
cases taken charge of in that last year having
reached three thousand five hundred. On one
day last September as many as twenty-seven
fresh cases were taken in. That was an
unexampled number, but often there are received at
many as twenty in a day, and they are apt to
come in a rush during about four hours of the
afternoon and evening, when one patient is not
in bed before another arrives at the door.

It is just a year since the committee of the
hospital, having found its two hundred beds all
insufficient for the public need, added, and
opened for the reception of patients, a new wing,
to contain sixty additional beds. This was
opened in a season of increasing epidemic,
just in time to prevent many fever cases from
being sent back to be centres of infection in
the overcrowded courts and alleys from, which
they are chiefly brought. During all the past
year not a single case was turned back from the
hospital doors for want of room, and the number
cared for has been greater by nearly a thousand
than in any former year.

How many lives outside are saved by the
withdrawal of so many centres of infection from
the hotbeds of London disease, it is impossible to
calculate. It has been shown that their reception
in the Fever Hospital involves a less
amount of risk to the lives of medical men,
nurses, students, or other patients, than their
distribution into fever wards of the general
hospitals. But all the diffused risk that, being
saved to the community, lessens the general
sacrifice of life, is concentrated among the
medical officers and nurses of the Fever
Hospital. The lesser and special is substituted for
the greater and general risk, but that special
risk is real, and known; and it is met deliberately,
as a soldier meets the risk of battle, by all who
are engaged at this hospital in disputing his
prey with the gaunt typhus fiend.

The present resident medical officer was
appointed in the summer of the year 'sixty-three.
In September of that year, typhus redoubling
strength, multiplied victims, and the labour of
the contest became incessant, at a holiday-time