"A remarkable instance of a circumscribed outbreak of fever was recorded by Sir R. Christison in 1846. It occurred in an isolated farm-house in the thinly-peopled county of Peebles, N.B. Every one of the fifteen residents was seized with fever, and three died. Many of the servants who worked during the day at the farm were also affected, but none communicated the disease to their families who did not visit the farm. There was no evidence that the disease was imported from without, and the only explanation of the outbreak was, that the drains and sewers were found all closed and obstructed with the accumulated filth proceeding from the privies and farm-yard, the effluvia from which was very offensive." "About Easter, 1848, a formidable outbreak of fever occurred in the Westminster School and the Abbey Cloisters, and for some days there {255} was a panic in the neighborhood respecting the 'Westminster fever.' No case of fever had occurred in the Abbey Cloisters for three years, and there was no evidence of its having been imported. Within little more than eleven days it affected thirty-six persons, all of the better class, and in three instances it proved fatal. Shortly before its first appearance there occurred two or three days of peculiarly hot weather, and a disagreeable stench, so powerful as to induce nausea, was complained of in the houses in question. It was found that the disease followed very exactly in its course the line of a foul and neglected private sewer or immense cesspool, in which fecal matter had been accumulating for years without any exit, and into which the contents of several small cesspools had been pumped immediately before the outbreak of fever. This elongated cesspool communicated by direct openings with the drains of all the houses in which it occurred; the only exception was that of several boys, who lived in a house at a little distance, but who were in the habit of playing every day in a yard in which there were several gully-holes opening into the foul drain."