The Isolation Hospital, Dagenham, Greater London
This aerial photo of an isolation hospital shows how they were built on the edge of urban areas, surrounded only by fields where possible. The Dagenham Sanatorium, Rainham Road South, was opened in 1899 as a smallpox hospital for the county borough of West Ham, and later became a tuberculosis sanatorium. At the start of the 20th century, before the invention of antibiotics, there were several infectious diseases that affected many people’s daily lives. The three main ones that required treatment in isolation hospitals were Tuberculosis (TB), Scarlet Fever & Polio.
