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There is no over-crowding especially calling for interference in
the Limehouse District; the parish of Wapping, most thickly peopled,
and yet the most healthy, has only 9 persons to a house; housedrainage
has been thoroughly carried out; cleansing and white-washing
exercised with a liberal hand; neither does the occupation (mostly outdoor)
nor the habits of the inhabitants account for this ill-proportioned
amount of zymotic deaths and disease.
The difference I apprehend to be this : with more or less of the
sanitary evils of the Western Districts, the Limehouse has a more imperfect
atul inefficient ventilation, and this grand privation to the public
health is very largely productive of fever—the true generator of typhus,
while giving an intensity, and, frequently, a fatality to other diseases.
Hut, waiving further allusion to this topic for the moment, the
Western Districts in turn most be called to account The death-rate,
the zymotic death rate—more especially, the fever-rate, is out of all
proportion less particularly so in St James's, compared with Limehouse.
But there I must stop, for, in glancing at the consumptive
column, with one exception, I see St. Marylebone has as high a per
centage on tho deaths from this fatal disease, as any of the Eastern
Districts, while St James still more exceeds the number, in the proportion
of about 13 to 10;—then, again, I survey the infantile column,
and find, with the exception of Limehouse, a trifle lees, very nearly
the same number of children under 5 years die in St James's parish,
or, 45 out of every 100 deaths, as in the Eastern Districts, and 41 in
St Marylebone.
Now, why the Western Districts should have less fever and
zymotic disease generally, yet a larger amount of consumption, and a
nearly equal degree of infantile mortality, may appear something like a
sanitary paradox. Perhaps it can thus bo explained:—There is more
Over-crowding in the Western Districts—for it is admitted in two divisions
of St. James's there are 10 persons to a house in one, and 13 in
another; and it is this over-crowding, probably, notoriously unfavourably
acting on the respiratory organs, is one cause which keeps up the
amount of consumption, and is as eminently dangerous, along with its
attendant squalor, on infantile life. The Limehouse District is less
crowded on the other hand ; there is probably, so far at least, less consumption,
and no disproportionate amount of infantile mortality. But,
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