Dr. Thomas King Chambers informed me, that at Ilford, in Essex, in the
summer of 1849, the cholera prevailed very severely in a row of houses a
little way from the main part of the town. It had visited every house in
the row but one. The refuse which overflowed from the privies and a
pigsty could be seen running into the well over the surface of the
ground, and the water was very fetid; yet it was used by the people in
all the houses except that which had escaped cholera. That house was
inhabited by a woman who took linen to wash, and she, finding that the
water gave the linen an offensive smell, paid a person to fetch water
for her from the pump in the town, and this water she used for culinary
purposes, as well as for washing.
The following circumstance was related to me, at the time it occurred,
by a gentleman well acquainted with all the particulars. The drainage
from the cesspools found its way into the well attached to some houses
at Locksbrook, near Bath, and the cholera making its appearance there in
the autumn of 1849, became very fatal. The people complained of the
water to the gentleman belonging to the property, who lived at Weston,
in Bath, and he sent a surveyor, who reported that nothing was the
matter. The tenants still complaining, the owner went himself, and on
looking at the water and smelling it, he said that he could perceive
nothing the matter with it. He was asked if he would taste it, and he
drank a glass of it. This occurred on a Wednesday; he went home, was
taken ill with the cholera, and died on the Saturday following, there
being no cholera in his own neighbourhood at the time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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