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of health, to the deficiency or want of which many a patient, with a
strumous, consumptive, or cachectic taint has prematurely succumbed.
No one can better comprehend the deteriorating influences at work about
the dwelling places of the poor than he who, in bis official capacity, has to
treat the diseases to which those influences but too frequently give rise;
and no one, therefore, can be placed in a better position than he to remedy,
by his teachings, many of those evils which, but for a little pains-taking
in that direction, it would, there is no doubt, become the work of years to
remove by the ordinary modes of proceeding. With a strong sense of the
responsibility attaching to the office I have undertaken, 1 could have
desired the opportunity of placing before the Board the results of some
inquiries and experiments I have instituted into the best means of ventilating
dwellings; but my space admonishes me to be brief, and I must,
therefore, reserving this and some other topics for discussion in future
reports, turn to the next subject of importance upon which it behoves me
to express my views.
The adoption of complete and effective drainage and sewerage, and the
total abolition of cesspools, which there is now so fair a prospect of
seeing realized in this sub-district, are measures the necessity for which
nothing can better or more clearly demonstrate than a consideration of
the effects which the defective system hitherto in force has had upon
many of the drinking waters in the neighbourhood. Next to pure air,
pure water, and an abundance of it, is the great desideratum; the want of
it, and the impurity of it, the too evident cause of much disease and great
demoralization. To detail one half of the evils consequent upon a defective
or an impure supply of this indispensable element, would necessitate
a special report. Without water, apart from its value as a beverage and
for cooking purposes, we can have neither drainage nor sewerage properly
or efficiently carried out, and without both of these it is next to impossible
to secure to the labouring poor, who are always the greatest sufferers from
these social evils, either decent homes or the means of rendering them so.
Nine years ago, when my attention was first directed to the sanitary condition
and requirements of this parish, I publicly expressed an opinion,
and I here repeat it, that "from the liability of the water, in many of the
localities in which the poor reside, to become contaminated by the percolation
of the contents of the numerous cesspools in the vicinity of the
wells, that the use of such fluid filth for drinking and for cooking purposes
is a fruitful source of disease; and it is a very great question with
me whether it will not one day or other be demonstrated, that the drinking
of such impure water gives rise to cholera in too many instances, and
possibly to many other diseases of which we at present know not the
origin." Since these remarks were made, Dr. Snow has most minutely
investigated the supposed influence of polluted water in the production of
cholera; and, resting his conclusions upon a very large basis of facts, has
avowed his opinion to be, that much of the mortality from cholera everywhere
resulted from the drinking of water contaminated by the percolation
into it of the contents of approximating cesspools. He instances, more
particularly, the outbreak in Soho, in 1854, and its too evident connection
with the consumption of impure water from a pump in Broad Street;
and states it as his belief, that "every case is caused by swallowing the
peculiar poison or morbid matter of cholera, which has proceeded from a