Medicine: Broken Record

The Royal Free Hospital on Gray's Inn Road set a notable precedent only four years after its opening in 1828: it became the first hospital in London to accept patients with infectious diseases, at a time when other hospitals still shunned them. But last week the Royal Free Hospital was closed on account of illness. The illness: an infectious disease, which had crippled its staff.

First to fall ill was a Cleveland social worker. Her symptoms fitted infectious mononucleosis. also called glandular fever. This is a little-understood (presumably viral) infection that is maddeningly persistent but rarely fatal, sometimes runs like a plague through institutions. That is what it did. Nurses at the hospital were soon dropping like flies: ten one day, 15 another. With 56 nurses and 23 other staff members out. the famed old Royal Free had to shut its doors for the first time in its history, transferred most of its 240 patients to other hospitals.