Bell advised that patients be removed from the hospital as quickly as possible: “Without the circle of infected walls men are safe.” Anything was better than “this house of death,” as Bell put it. Let the surgeon “lay them in a school-room, a church, on a dung-hill, or in a stable.” Others agreed: “This hospital gangrene … no doubt depends on the unwholesome atmosphere exciting preternatural irritability, and the treatment, therefore, essentially requires removal from the sphere of this deleterious influence.”
