A copy of a photograph of the ward deck of the Atlas Smallpox Hospital Ship; c1890-c1899. Joyce Green Hospital was once the centrepiece of the Metropolitan Asylums Board complex of smallpox and isolation hospitals. The hospital had a railway system; which conveyed patients from ambulance steamers bringing them down river. The pier; the steamers and the horse-drawn trams have now all vanished. In 1903 the Joyce Green Smallpox Hospital opened at Dartford; Kent; replacing the old wooden battleships (Atlas and Endymion) which had been used as smallpox hospitals