The Metropolitan Asylums Board had already erected hospitals, and were doing a vast amount of good and preventing the spread of disease.
But by the people themselves the seeds of infection were scattered broadcast.
Dr. Simon, the Medical Officer to the Privy Council, in his Report of 1865, wrote:—
“As to contagions already current in the country, practically any diseased person scatters his infection broadcast, almost where he will—typhus or scarlatina, typhoid or smallpox, or diphtheria, … the present unlimited license seems urgently to demand restriction.”
But the license to kill remained without restriction, except that of entering a public conveyance.[129]
As the Medical Officer of Health for St. Mary, Newington, wrote in 1871:—
“How many are the ways in which the spread of contagious disease is, as it were, invited, no one knows better than a sanitary officer. Washing, mangling, needlework, go on in many an infected house; children, aye adults also, the sick and the sound, mix indiscriminately. I have even known the exhibition, as a sight, of the corpse of a smallpox patient….”
And the Medical Officer of Health for Paddington called attention (1873–4) to—
“The extreme indifference displayed with regard to these diseases (measles, &c.), by many of the lower and middle class is an unmistakable sign of an ignorant belief that they are natural events; and such a belief leads to a carelessness of management much to be condemned.