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Incurable disease caused by poverty TB, or consumption, an airborne disease, carried by coughs and sneezes, was a disease of poverty… in the days before antibiotics it was also incurable, and accounted for a fifth of mortalities. see below History After 160 years of care, has the London Chest breathed its last? The London Chest Hospital has fought many battles – against the diseases of poverty and supporting our soldiers in two world wars – but is this a battle too far? Got a story to tell? If you have a tale about East End history, write to John Rennie or email him at johnrennie@gmail.com www.eastlondonhistory.com BY JOHN RENNIE THE traditional injuries of war were grim enough. But as World War I rolled inexorably on, and the wounded were brought home to London, there were new horrors to contend with. The sheer number of casualties for a start; the brutality and waste of trench warfare; the mental scars of shellshock and – beginning at Ypres on the Western Front in 1915 – victims of gas. But in those far-off days, when it seems every London ‘village’ had its own cottage hospital, there was a place of recuperation in the East End for those lucky enough to make it back. Now the London Chest Hospital, which has endured that arc so typical of a London infirmary (early Victorian enthusiasm, decades of benign neglect, meddling by politicians, and reinvention as part of a larger institution) faces that most 21st century of London fates: threats of demolition and redevelopment into overpriced apartments. The hospital services will become part of one of the largest specialist cardiovascular units in the UK, based at Barts Hospital in the City. Rest assured though, campaigners won’t let the London Chest’s Queen Anne-style building go gently into that dark night. That tireless champion against the wilful destruction of historic East End buildings, Tom Ridge, is on the case and will doubtless fight until the wrecking ball is unleashed. Back in the Great War, truth be told, there wasn’t much the London Chest Hospital could offer the unfortunate Tommies who had ingested mustard and chlorine gas, besides rest, recuperation, fresh air… and the time to get better all by themselves. But that was the hospital’s speciality, and for decades that was the way it had been treating victims of the dreaded 19th and early 20th century plague of tuberculosis. The genesis of the London Chest was in the increased density of population, and squalor, of the East End in the mid-1800s. TB, or consumption, an airborne disease, carried by coughs and sneezes, was largely a disease of poverty… in the days before antibiotics it was also incurable, and accounted for around a fifth of mortalities. Little wonder it was also known as ‘the white death’. In March 1848, a group of City merchants and bankers called a meeting in a City pub to debate setting up a hospital for those unable to afford treatment. Six years before, the Hospital for Consumption and Diseases of the Chest (now the Brompton) had been set up in west London. The Royal Chest Hospital, meanwhile, in the City Road, was groaning under the weight of cases. The group, 13 of the 19 were Quakers, had powerful friends and enlisted Prince Albert as a patron. By June that year, the trustees had raised the cash to open a dispensary at 6 Liverpool Street… it was soon snowed under with ‘customers’. In 1849, the committee took the lease on a four-acre site on Bonner’s Field, itself an historically fascinating patch of east London. This had been the site of the palace of the infamous Edmund Bonner, the Bishop who enthusiastically burned nearly 300 ‘heretics’ (Protestants in fact) during the reign of ‘Bloody’ Mary, in the 16th century. The patch of Crown Estates land lay next to the newly laid out Victoria Park – East Enders were at last getting their own green lungs amid the smog and filth of the sprawling city. The construction of the 164-bed hospital occasioned some Victorian vandalism of its own – Bloody Bonner’s Bishop’s Hall, 300 years’ history notwithstanding –was summarily demolished, and in June 1851, Albert laid the foundation stone. Funds were generated by the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park and by Albert’s powerful friends –helping raise the £30,000 needed to open it. An elegant Queen Anne-style building emerged, with a modern, corridor layout (rather than the faux-Gothic popular for hospitals at the time) and the first patients arrived. Open-air treatment was the thing. Windows were flung wide open, patients were encouraged to vacate the building and walk and, if they couldn’t, their beds would be wheeled into the grounds. During inclement weather, waterproof covers would be laid over their blankets. Indoors, patients wore a mask containing creosote-impregnated lint (removed only for meals) and underwent creosote inhalations in the basement. And during World War I the soldiers arrived. Many had been gassed, others suffered TB, pneumonia and bronchitis – the levels of health and fitness of East End conscripts was famously poor, and the privations of the trenches broke the health of many. In World War II, the hospital did its bit once more, half the beds being given to victims of air raids – ironically, Luftwaffe bombs during the Blitz of 1941 destroyed the hospital chapel and the nurses’ home. In 1949 came the NHS, and the London Chest joined forces with the Brompton. At the same time, the first antibiotics were coming onstream (penicillin had been discovered in 1928). For the first time the hospital had a genuinely efficacious method of treating TB. That took the treatment out of the hospital and into the GP’s surgery – inoculation against TB saw the disease all but eradicated in the post-War years, though it has made a worrying comeback in Tower Hamlets in recent times. So the hospital changed, developing specialist units for cystic fibrosis and heart attack care (stricken footballer Fabrice Muamba received life-saving treatment there in 2012), as it was folded into Barts Health NHS Trust alongside Barts and the Royal London. Now, its future hangs in the balance. The London Chest Hospital has fought many battles – against the diseases of poverty and supporting our soldiers in two world wars – but is this a battle too far? (Above) British soldiers from the 55th division suffering from the effects of gas in the trenches, on April 10, 1918 (Left) The Queen Anne-style London Chest Hospital, under threat of developers 23 – 29 JUNE 2014 N E W S F R OM TOWER HAMLETS COUNCIL AND YOUR COMMUNITY 13


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