SIXTEEN PATIENTS DEAD

MILAN, Thursday (Later).

The fire at the Santo Spirito Hospital was not extinguished until ten o’clock this morning. The disaster has caused an enormous impression in Rome. The hospital is one of the largest in the city and was famous for centuries before modern hospitals were built. The conflagration is supposed to have been caused by a short circuit in a room annexed to the laundry, where a quantity of wood was stored. A panic followed soon after the first alarm when the electric light went out, which, contrary to first reports, preceded the falling in of the floor in the room occupied by chronic patients. The latest report is that only sixteen – not nineteen – perished, and it seems that they were suffocated by the smoke long before the flames reached them. Four patients had been carried out on the shoulders of the doctors just before the floor collapsed.