In consequence of a great outcry on the part of the public, who
naturally connected the great fatality of cholera in some measure with
the turbidity and offensive smell of the drinking water, the Company
entirely ceased to draw water from the Tyne on the 15th September; and
although the Tyne water was not entirely out of the pipes for a day or
two, the deaths, which had been rapidly increasing, began to diminish on
the 17th, and were lessened considerably by the 20th. The following is
the course of the mortality in Newcastle, in the most fatal part of the
epidemic; and it began to decline at exactly the same time in Gateshead:
September 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23
DEATHS 38 59 90 106 114 103 103 111 85 68 82 60.
The late General Board of Health directed one of their medical
inspectors, Dr. Waller Lewis, to make minute inquiry as to the relative
effects produced by the use of pure spring water, and that of the Water
Company, during the epidemic of cholera in Newcastle; and it is much to
be regretted that the inquiry was not carried out. To have conducted the
inquiry through the whole of Newcastle and Gateshead would not have
entailed a quarter as much labour as my investigations in Lambeth,
Newington, and the Borough. Dr. Lewis called on Mr. Main, the secretary
of the Water Company, and they made an inquiry in certain houses, taken
at random, through three streets, and also in Greenhow Terrace, where a
severe outbreak of cholera had occurred, although it was not supplied by
the Company, but had what was reported to be good spring water. Dr.
Lewis gave up the inquiry because he could not find two places exactly
alike in all their physical conditions,—one place supplied with spring
water, the other by the Company. He made no report of what he had done;
but Mr. Main sent a paper on the subject of this commenced inquiry to
the Pathological Society of Newcastle, an abstract of which appeared in
the “Medical Times and Gazette”.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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