Foremost among the diseases which worked unceasing and deadly havoc among the people was fever. By its wide and constant prevalence and great fatality, it was the first upon which attention became fixed. The returns which were collected as regarded it related to twenty metropolitan unions or parishes, and in them only to the pauper population, some 77,000 in number. But they showed that in the single year of 1838, out of those 77,000 persons, 14,000, or very nearly one-fifth, had been attacked by fever, and nearly 1,300 had died.[1] Being limited to the technically pauper population this information related only to one section of the community; but it nevertheless afforded the means of forming a rough estimate of the amount of fever among the community as a whole. And another fact also at once became apparent, namely, that certain parts of London were more specially and persistently haunted or infested by fever than others. In Whitechapel, Holborn, Lambeth, and numerous other parishes or districts, fever of the very worst forms was always prevalent--"typhus, and the fevers which proceed from the malaria of filth." The sanitary condition of those districts was fearful, every sanitary abomination being rampant therein, whilst certain localities in them were so bad that "it would be utterly impossible for any description to convey to the mind an adequate conception of their state." And most marvellous and deplorable of all was the fact that this fearful condition of things was allowed, not merely to continue, but to flourish without any attempt being made to remedy, or even to mitigate, some of the inevitable and most disastrous consequences. As regarded the districts in which the wealthier classes resided, systematic efforts had been made on a considerable scale to widen the streets, to remove obstructions to the circulation of free currents of air, and to improve the drainage--an acknowledgment and appreciation of the fact that these things did deleteriously affect people's health. But nothing whatever had been attempted to improve the condition of the districts inhabited by the poor. Those districts were not given a thought to, though in them annually thousands and tens of thousands of victims suffered or died from diseases which were preventable. Reports such as these attracted some degree of attention, and awakened a demand for further information, and in 1840 the House of Commons appointed a Select Committee to inquire as to the health, not only of London, but of the large towns throughout the country. Their report[2] enlarged upon the evils previously in part portrayed, and emphasised them.