Reports Relating to the Sanitary Condition of the City of LondonSimon, John
History
Reports Relating to the Sanitary Condition of the City of London
Simon, John
Cemeteries -- England -- London; Mortality -- Statistics; Sanitation -- England -- London
I might give you many instances in illustration of these points--showing
you how, under the operation of specific sanitary faults, the
Cholera-mortality of districts acquires an artificial exaltation; but
few comparisons will suffice. At the period of the epidemic of 1849,
your best conditioned sub-district was the north-west of the City of
London Union; and (among those of the same level) your worst was the
sub-district of Cripplegate, which at that time was in a very
unsatisfactory state, abounding in open cesspools and their
consequences. In the former of these sub-districts the Cholera-mortality
_per_ 10,000 was 19; in the latter 47; and it is easy to show that
additional sanitary errors soon develop a larger fatality. Not far from
your boundary, at the same level with these two sub-districts, in the
Hackney-Road division of Bethnal-Green, it rose to 110; this large
mortality being principally confined to a very small portion of the
district, wherein (the local Registrar reports) sewers were almost
entirely absent, houses were contaminated with the filth of years,
streets were remaining for days uncleansed from accumulating dirt, and
all waste water (including animal secretions) was uniformly thrown into
the public way.
Such are the conditions under which, at any imaginable height in the
metropolis, Cholera may decimate a population: such, in their worst
form, were the conditions which at Merthyr-Tydvil--several hundred feet
above the water-level, carried the Cholera-mortality to more than double
the high metropolitan rate just mentioned. Taught by this case the power
of human mismanagement to futilise the favours of Nature; taught that
perverse ingenuity can construct poison-beds for the development of
Cholera, high above the usual track of its devastation; one gladly turns
from the horrible instructiveness of such a lesson, to gather the
kindred evidence of contrast: and happily there is abundant evidence to
show how much may be effected, even in the most tainted districts, to
purchase a circumscribed exemption from the disease by the judicious
application of sanitary care.
In the remarks which I have made on the local distribution of Cholera,
you will have observed that I dwell particularly on one class of
sanitary evils as concerned in its production; on that class, namely,
which consists in the retention and soakage of organic refuse--on that
class, which has its appointed antidote in a system of inodorous
drainage, of uninterrupted pavement, of complete and punctual scavenage.
On this I particularly insist, because I believe that here is the very
atmosphere without which Cholera would cease.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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