§ 77. Two individual cases which were narrated by the physician who attended them, will serve to convey a conception of a large proportion of the common cases denoted by the units of the statistical evidence derived from towns, and will illustrate more clearly the economy of the prevention of sickness and death, as a superior economy of the incidents of sickness as well as of funerals. One case was that of an intelligent industrious man who had been foreman to a tradesman, and having married and established himself as a master tradesman, had a family of children. To diminish the expense of his family he took a house which he let off to lodgers, retaining to himself only the garrets and the underground or kitchen floor. He had five children who became unhealthy and were attacked with cachectic diseases and scald head; and the expense of an apothecary to the family during one year was 59_l._: but still more serious disease afterwards appearing, a physician was called in, who perceiving the impure air of the apartments, pointed out the causes of the varied illness which had prevailed, and the remedy—removal from the house. In another case the foreman of a brewery married a healthy wife, who gave birth to seven children, of whom six died at various ages, while young, from diseases evidently springing from impure air. The source of this impure air was an ill-constructed cesspool in the lower part of the house, the stench of which was pointed out by the physician, who happened to have a perception of such causes, and advised the immediate removal of the family. Since that time they have had two other children, who with the third which escaped, are now living in their better lodging in the enjoyment of good health; the last of the children who died, when “ailing,” was sent to the purer atmosphere of a rural district, and returned in robust health, but soon after his exposure to the impure atmosphere was attacked with fever, of which he died within a fortnight. It was in the power of neither of these persons to obtain an amendment of the general system of drainage, which occasioned the atmospheric impurity under which they suffered; but the actual expenses of structural measures of prevention would not, as an entire outlay, have amounted to half the apothecary’s bill for drugs in the first case, or of the expenses of the funerals (superadded to the expenses of drugs) in the second case; but if the expenses of those structural arrangements were defrayed by an annual payment of instalments of principal and interest, spread over a period of 30 years, or a period coincident with the benefit, the expense of the extended or combined measure of prevention would not be more than 1_l._ 5_s._ 10_d._ per tenement, or perhaps a small proportion of that sum, to the individual family.[18]