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Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health.
21

This Table shews the streets, places, courts, and alleys where the most common and fatal
diseases have occurred. And the old tale is repeated, that where there is overcrowding,
deficiency of light, want of air, and other sanatory necessaries, there the death rate is highest.
Much has lately been said and written concerning the imperfect sanatory condition of
many parts of this Parish: " that if we are not positively going back, we are standing still;
that epidemic diseases and poverty here find their seat and home, carrying off victims, who
had they resided elsewhere, might still have been alive; that, in fact, there hangs thickly
and heavily over us the cloud of decay and neglect." Complaints of this kind, indeed of any
kind, are easily made, yet often most untruthfully, inasmuch as they are only part of a
truth. Suppose, in describing the character of a man, you only speak of his follies and his
weaknesses, he would make but a sorry figure; but the likeness would not be correct, it
would not represent the whole man; would not be a nature's photograph. There is scarcely
a parish in London, of which the like might not be said, as was said of ours. This Parish
is neither better nor worse than its neighbours. I find that there were twenty-one applicants
for Sayer's and Shaw's Charity, whose average age was 73 years. Now these applicants
are these who have necessarily passed through much want and suffering,. and who have
lived long in the Parish; most of them, probably, all their lives. There was one aged
eighty.two years, three eighty.one, one seventy.nine, two seventy.eight, one seventy.seven,