Report to Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State For the Home Department, from the Poor Law Commissioners, on an Inquiry Into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain; With AppendicesChadwick, Edwin
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Report to Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State For the Home Department, from the Poor Law Commissioners, on an Inquiry Into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain; With Appendices
Chadwick, Edwin
Housing -- Great Britain; Public health -- Great Britain
One effect of the attention given to the condition of the workers in the
factories has been, that ventilation has been extensively introduced,
and with marked effects, on the condition of the workpeople. When I was
at Glasgow a striking instance was pointed out to me of the beneficial
effects of ventilation when applied to the dwellings of the working
classes connected with such establishments. I was informed there was in
that city an assemblage of dwellings for their workpeople, called, from
its mode of construction and the crowd collected in it, the Barracks.
This building contained 500 persons; every room contained one family.
The consequences of this crowding of the apartments, which were badly
ventilated, and the filth were, that fever was scarcely ever absent from
the building. There were sometimes as many as seven cases in one day,
and in the last two months of 1831 there were 57 cases in the building.
All attempts to induce the inmates to ventilate their rooms were
ineffectual, and the proprietors of the work, on the recommendation of
Mr. Fleming, a surgeon of the district, fixed a simple tin tube of two
inches in diameter, into the ceiling of each room, and these tubes led
into one general tube, the extremity of which was inserted into the
chimney of the factory furnace. By the perpetual draught thus produced
upon the atmosphere of each room the inmates were compelled, whether
they would or not, to breathe pure air. The effect was that, during the
ensuing eight years, fever was scarcely known in the place. The process
was apparently defective only in not providing for the appropriate
warmth of the air introduced. The cost of remedies previously applied in
the public hospitals to the fever cases, continually produced as
described in the barracks, were stated by Dr. Cowan to have afforded a
striking contrast to the cost of the means of prevention.
Similar defective ventilation and overcrowding in rooms of work, with
the addition of the deterioration of the air by the use of candles or
gas-lamps at night-work, produce similar effects on the milliners and
dressmakers employed at the larger workshops of the metropolis. In a
return of the causes of death to the milliners and dressmakers who died
during the year 1839, in the unions of the metropolis, in which we have
no means of distinguishing those who worked separately or in small
numbers, the results were as follows:—
TABULAR STATEMENT of DEATHS from Disease of Milliners and
Dressmakers, in the Metropolitan Unions during the year 1839, as
shown by the Mortuary Registers.
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