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TWELFTH ANNUAL REPORT
of the
MEDICAL OFFICER OF HEALTH.
To the Board of Works, Fulham District.
Gentlemen,
For the twelfth time I have the honour to lay before you my
annual report, and with increasing satisfaction at our sanitary condition.
Animated by a desire to carry out your administrative functions
in this respect with as little oppression as possible, no great
and sweeping changes have been made by you at any time in our
social condition ; but it must be a source of great gratification to you
to find that, though moderation in everything has prompted you in
your actions, our District is gradually and most manifestly improving
in all those great features of Hygeine now becoming essential in the
public eye, and which, indeed, are truly so where such masses of people
congregate together. Hammersmith took the initiative, and Fulham
has closely followed in her wake in the demolition of those numerous
and fearful sources of mischief, our open ditches, until we can now
look through both these parishes and scarcely see a trace of them.
Silently, but safely, the tide of sewage flows in grand culverts beneath
our leading thoroughfares, and the great mass of houses abutting
thereon have been drained into them. Still, with cormorant-like
capacity, our once open fields cry for more of these hidden channels.
The operations of the builder have annihilated acres of garden ground
by the hundred, and even Fulham fields, that noted land of cabbages,
is rapidly yielding, and will ere long gradually produce another crop.
Here, however, I fear in several places the disadvantages will well
nigh outweigh the benefits. The class of property likely in some of
these cases to be erected will be little of an improvement over
Wheatsheaf Alley and kindred places. Already we have reaped some
fruits. John-street and Francis-street are types of what will follow
them, and it will much astonish me if, with all our supervision,
pauperism and sickness do not prevail. If the present Building Act
be not sufficient to stay such work, I feel the time has indeed arrived
when your Board should take some steps to ensure its amendment,
and that without delay. The co-operation of other suburban Vestries