Death in the Smoke

It does not take "a London particular" to send cough-racked Britons to their beds --or their graves. The tight little island's air is tightly packed with pollutant particles, boosting the bronchitis and chest-disease rate to the world's highest. Last week Dr. Horace Joules (rhymes with rules), of London's Central Middlesex Hospital, painted a Dickensian picture of what a medical nightmare the past winter had been in the city which some Englishmen still call "the Smoke."

"We are a great community hospital of 800 beds," said Dr. Joules, "but during February and March we ceased to be a general hospital. We had to suspend all admissions except emergency cases of chest and heart disease.* In those two months we admitted 616 such cases, and 196 died. The hospital really was an annex of the mortuary. If there had been a few days of smog, there would have been a holocaust in London."

Echoed Edgware General Hospital's Dr. Hugh J. Trenchard: "It is time to panic."

*The two are closely related because failing hearts may be fatally threatened by breathing difficulties.

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