promoted by the Central Authority itself, the Metropolitan Asylums Board were expressly empowered to receive non-pauper patients, though only under contracts with the local public health authorities, by which they were to be paid for.[682] We cannot discover which vestries and district boards, if any, entered into such contracts. Not until 1883, when these fever and small-pox hospitals had been a dozen years in use by non-paupers, was the position temporarily legalised by the Diseases Prevention Act of 1883[683]--a measure also carried by the Central Authority itself--which, whilst leaving these hospitals as Poor Law institutions, administered by a Poor Law authority, and kept up out of the poor rate, declared that admission, treatment, and maintenance therein should--whether the patients were or were not otherwise paupers--not be deemed parochial relief, or carry with it any disqualification whatever.[684] Since that day we have the remarkable spectacle of the Poor Law Authorities, Central and Local, annually congratulating themselves on the fact that, year after year, they were managing to attract into these expensive Poor Law institutions, for gratuitous maintenance and treatment, a larger and larger percentage of the total number of cases notified.[685] [674] "The sick" were held to include not only acute cases, but also cases of "chronic disease requiring regular medical treatment and trained nursing" (and also venereal and skin diseases, including the itch). (Local Government Board to Poplar Union, October 1871; MS. Minutes, Poplar Board of Guardians, 6th October 1871). [675] Local Government Board to Dr. Mortimer Glanville (_Lancet_ Memorial on Poor Law Medical Relief Reform), 12th November 1878; in Eighth Annual Report, 1878-9, p. 91. [676] The more old-fashioned guardians failed to keep pace with the Central Authority in its ignoring of the principle of "less eligibility" with regard to the sick; _see_, for instance, _The New Pauper Infirmaries and Casual Wards_, by a Lambeth Guardian, 1875, in which the elaborate hospital requirements are objected to as being far too good for paupers. Where the guardians persisted in refusing to provide the elaborate and expensive new infirmary accommodation considered necessary, the Central Authority at last issued a peremptory Order requiring them to submit plans within a month, under penalty of having plans "prepared at the expense of the union" and of being deprived of "the benefit of participation in the Common Poor Fund" (Local Government Board to St. Olave's Union, June 1873; see _Local Government Chronicle_, 5th July 1873, p. 379).