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Oamaru Mail, Volume IV, Issue 929, 8 April 1879, Page 2

Sucre writing the above we have received further information on the subject on which we have treated. No less than five typhoid fever patients, the whole of which have come from Waimate, are now in the fever ward of the Oamaru Hospital. There was no accommodation in the Waimate Hospital. In their extremity, therefore. they came here, and the Oamaru Hospital Committee wonld have acted inhumanely,' and inconsiderately to this community, had they not admitted them into their institution. But there is a limit to human endurance, and so there is to the accomodation of the fever ward of our little Hospital. It was not constructed as a place of refuge to be used for the accommodation of the worst hospital cases of other districts than that of Oamaru. Already the fever ward is so compctely occupied by Waimate patients that Dr. Wait ha 3 been compelled to refuse admission to an applicant who has found an asylum in a room of one of ottr hotels. It is very risky, but there was no help for it. unless our Hospital Committee adopted the better expedient of utilising an isolated cottage as a fever ward and pnt him there. But this would have entailed an outlay that the Committee ought not to be called upon to make-, and one, indeed, that the funds of their institution will not stand. Viewing tf»o matter as one that demands immediate act lenient, the Chairman of the Oamaru Hospital Committee yesterday sought aeonsaltation with authorities of the Waimate Hospital, and expostulated with them on the injustice and danger of their foisting Waimate tyhpoid fever patients on Ommaro. They replied that there is not accommodation in their own Hospital for anch patients. But that does not palliate what they have done. When they found that the dangerous malady was spreading, they should have set aside a cottage as a fever ward, and not have rendered it neeeasarv for other people to do that for the .tcommiodattoii of their patients. The Waimate Hospital Committee remind us of the parable of the Foolish Virgins, wiin ask their more thoughtful sisters to ftfl their empty lamps with the oil that thev had provided for themselves, and of which they had none to spare. We were jt.tsfe congratulating ourselves that we were as free "from typhoid fever as any large town in the Colony : but now that the Watmato Hospital Committee has been s-> kind a* to. render it necessary for fever patients t»» travel by rail, and, after paradtii" »nr streets, find an asylum in n«r Hospital, ihe greatest care will be necessary to prevent the spread of typhoid in this town.