Fig. 1.

Map of smallpox hospitals in Victorian London. Significant public provision of smallpox beds in London began with the removal in 1846 of a hospital at Battle Bridge (the site of Kings Cross station) to Highgate. There a ‘London Smallpox Hospital’ was built where Whittington Hospital now is. From 1867 the Metropolitan Asylums Board (MAB) assumed responsibility for providing care for pauper smallpox patients, which it did first at Hampstead (1870) and then in permanent hospitals built during the 1870s at Homerton, Fulham, Stockwell and Deptford. In 1884 the MAB moved its smallpox beds to ‘river hospitals’, first the ‘Dreadnought’ at Greenwich then, within the year, to three ships moored on the Long Reach (just upstream of the present M25 crossing). The 1901–1903 smallpox epidemic led to extensive building nearby on the Dartford marshes (Long Reach and Orchard hospitals, and then the 985-bedded Joyce Green Hospital, opened in 1903). To access the river hospitals the MAB built wharves at Rotherhithe, Blackwall and Fulham, and used steamboat ambulances to convey patients to the Long Reach.