This was the well-meant but somewhat fanatical application of a trite and commonplace notion. It was well understood by reflective persons at that time, who were quite sound on the contagiousness of fever, that the whole question of segregating the poor in fever hospitals was beset with difficulties, not merely of expense but also of expediency. A Select Committee of the House of Commons sat upon it in 1818, and published their report, with the minutes of evidence, on the 20th May. So much had been said in Parliament by Peel and others, and said so truly, of the spreading of fever all over Ireland by whole families turned adrift in beggary, that the Select Committee were full of ideas of contagion, and of the great opportunity of suppressing fever by destroying its germs or seeds. But they had soon occasion to learn that a fever may be potentially contagious, yet not contagious in all circumstances, and that segregation in fever hospitals had a rival in dispersion through general hospitals. Half-a-dozen London physicians of position, answering respectively for Guy’s, St Thomas’s, the London, St Bartholomew’s, St George’s, the Westminster and the Middlesex Hospitals, declared that they mixed their cases of contagious fever in the ordinary wards among the other patients; and when asked by the astonished Committee whether the fever did not spread, they answered one after another with singular unanimity, “Never,” which under cross-examination, became in one or two instances, “hardly ever,” as, for example, in the evidence for St Thomas’s Hospital, where a sister and a nurse had caught fever and died. The point of this London evidence was that the great safeguard against febrile contagion was free dilution with air, and that the great provocation of a contagious principle was to “concentrate” the cases of fever[333]. The Bristol experience in the same epidemic, although it did not come before the Select Committee, was wholly in agreement with medical opinion in London. The fever-cases there were received either into St Peter’s Hospital, which was the city poor-house, or into the General Infirmary. The former was an old irregular building, badly ventilated, in which the contagion spread freely to the ordinary inmates and became very virulent. Contrasting with the apartments of the old poor’s house, the wards of the Bristol General Infirmary were spacious, lofty, well-ventilated: