Although the facts shown in the above table afford very strong evidence
of the powerful influence which the drinking of water containing the
sewage of a town exerts over the spread of cholera, when that disease is
present, yet the question does not end here; for the intermixing of the
water supply of the Southwark and Vauxhall Company with that of the
Lambeth Company, over an extensive part of London, admitted of the
subject being sifted in such a way as to yield the most incontrovertible
proof on one side or the other. In the sub-districts enumerated in the
above table as being supplied by both Companies, the mixing of the
supply is of the most intimate kind. The pipes of each Company go down
all the streets, and into nearly all the courts and alleys. A few houses
are supplied by one Company and a few by the other, according to the
decision of the owner or occupier at that time when the Water Companies
were in active competition. In many cases a single house has a supply
different from that on either side. Each Company supplies both rich and
poor, both large houses and small; there is no difference either in the
condition or occupation of the persons receiving the water of the
different Companies. Now it must be evident that, if the diminution of
cholera, in the districts partly supplied with the improved water,
depended on this supply, the houses receiving it would be the houses
enjoying the whole benefit of the diminution of the malady, whilst the
houses supplied with the water from Battersea Fields would suffer the
same mortality as they would if the improved supply did not exist at
all. As there is no difference whatever, either in the houses or the
people receiving the supply of the two Water Companies, or in any of the
physical conditions with which they are surrounded, it is obvious that
no experiment could have been devised which would more thoroughly test
the effect of water supply on the progress of cholera than this, which
circumstances placed ready made before the observer.
The experiment, too, was on the grandest scale. No fewer than three
hundred thousand people of both sexes, of every age and occupation, and
of every rank and station, from gentlefolks down to the very poor, were
divided into two groups without their choice, and, in most cases,
without their knowledge; one group being supplied with water containing
the sewage of London, and, amongst it, whatever might have come from the
cholera patients, the other group having water quite free from such
impurity.
[Sidenote: EPIDEMIC OF 1854, IN THE SOUTH DISTRICTS OF LONDON.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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