The President of the Local Government Board, Mr. Mater- Booth,
did not give much comfort to the deputation which visited him on Thursday to protest against turning the hospital at the foot of Hampstead Heath into a hospital for contagious diseases during the periods of any epidemic attack. The case against that plan is this,—that Hampstead will be injured not only in reputation as a great sanitary resort, but, as a consequence of the injury to its reputation, in usefulness also, for people will not go where they fear infection ; that such a hospital ought not to be surrounded on almost all sides by a thick population, but should be placed in some kind of at least partial insulation; and that it ought not to be approached only by roads on which a huge miscellaneous population is always travelling. It is also asserted that during the use of the Hampstead Hospital for the small-pox outbreak, a great many houses in the immediate neighbourhood were infected directly from the hospital. To these objections Mr. Sclater-Booth replied, first, by challenging the deputation to find a more suitable site ; secondly, by saying that the injury to the reputation of Hampstead as a sanitary resort is no greater than the injury to Clapham Common from Stock- well Hospital, or Victoria Park from Homerton Hospital ; and lastly, that unless you have the hospital very near town and accessible by great thoroughfares,—which can hardly help being also populous,—it will not answer its purpose at all. The challenge to produce a better alternative site should certainly be taken up by the Hampstead party, as it is of the essence of the question. We should regret to see so noble a playground as Hampstead injured in the esteem of Londoners by either well- grounded or ill-grounded fears of the infection spread by the hos- pital; moreover, hospitals of this infectious kind might fairly, we think, be enclosed in two or three acres of their own, so as not to abut on the streets. But how to provide a useful hospital for London that is not approached by a great and populous thorough- fare, we agree with Mr. Mater-Booth that it is very difficult to conceive.
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