Contagion, Isolation, and Biopolitics in Victorian London by Matthew L. Newsom Kerr

Author:Matthew L. Newsom Kerr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Smallpox and Urban Spatial Crisis

The Asylums Board had not finished building its asylums when a ferocious epidemic of smallpox struck in December 1870. This would go down as the most devastating outbreak of the disease in the nineteenth century and prompted a desperate scramble by various London bodies to provide sufficient hospital accommodation. The MAB’s first hospital at Hampstead initially only consisted of a few brick buildings and a series of wooden huts. These were quickly overwhelmed and had to be expanded fivefold over the next year. The hospitals at Stockwell and Homerton were meanwhile rushed to completion, but these too filled as soon as they opened in January. One hospital superintendent recalled that “every hospital was crammed.” 44 Eventually more than 16,000 smallpox patients passed through the MAB hospitals over eighteen months, but this was a paltry portion of the total sickness, and other institutions consistently failed to pick up the slack. The government again recommended that parishes supply structures of very simple construction such as iron-framed huts and tents that could be quickly erected and then dismantled and stored for future use. But in the end hospitalization played a rather small role in this epidemic; of the 9643 metropolitan deaths from smallpox, only 3020 occurred in hospitals. 45

The smallpox of 1871 unleashed a practically chaotic and contradictory proliferation of small temporary hospitals by local authorities. Most of these were hastily arranged, often ramshackle and ad hoc affairs placed in locations already under parochial control but inconvenient in almost every other way. St. Luke’s parish, for example, erected a temporary iron-framed hospital in an ancient parish burial ground “situated in the very midst of the very dense population of Golden-lane.” 46 New burials had been barred in London since the 1850s and, although metropolitan churchyards were starting to be repurposed for green spaces and public gardens, the majority were still depressing and insalubrious blights. The Shoreditch Vestry placed a structure for thirty-five patients in the old parish burial ground north of Hackney Road, which contained a decrepit watch-house itself previously used as an improvised cholera hospital. (Even though the alarmed Shoreditch MOH stated that up to 300 parishioners were falling ill each week, Vestry members grumbled about the hospital’s cost and some even questioned the infectiousness of smallpox.) 47 Exhibiting somewhat more resolve, the St. Marylebone Vestry cleared the parochial stonebreaking yard and erected the temporary iron building it had employed in a previous smallpox outbreak. Once this hospital filled, the Vestry authorized the erection of a second structure, which was fitted up in just five days and received 215 smallpox patients over the course of six months. 48

Temporary smallpox hospitals tended to be erected in a parish’s outcast and liminal regions—sites that perhaps left much to be desired sanitarily, but were near to the presumed disease haunts and far from influential public opinion. The St. George’s Union chose to place a temporary smallpox hospital in “a most wretched, filthy court” at St. Ermin’s Hill: a small remnant of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.