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8 Parish of St. George the Martyr, Southwark.
the outcast in the street, whom nobody heeds for, or the Heir to a Throne for whom bows
down a nation in sympathy and prayer. Diseases which destroy in England somewhere
about 110,000 persons annually may not be slighted. In this district during the past year,
453 deaths have been attributed to Zymotic diseases. The most fatal amongst them has
been small pox, which has numbered 120 victims. So far as this particular disease is concorned,
every one of these 120 might at this time have been in the full possession of life,
instead of forming grave-heaps in a cemetery. Macaulay writing about an epidemic of this
disease which was raging in 1694, and which carried off the Queen, thus puwerfully
characterises it: "That disease, over which science has since achieved a succession of
glorious and beneficent victories, was then the most terrible of all the ministers of death.
The havoc of the plague had been more rapid ; but the plague had visited our shores only
once or twice within living memory ; and the small pox was always present, filling the
churchyards with corpses, tormenting with the constant fears all whom it had not yet
stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the
babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks
of the betrothed maiden objects of horrour to her lover." Unfortunately, science and its
teachings are not always appreciated, nor put into practice.
The following ways in which this disease was propagated, or may have been propagated
came under our notice. We have known under-clothing taken from a person suffering from
small pox and pawned or sold ; we have seen mangling done where a small pox patient lay
in an adjoining room, and where dress-making was going on in the same room; we have
seen men walking in the streets with the disease full upon them ; we have seen the contents
of a costermonger's barrow under a bed upon which lay a small pox patient; we have
known a child go out to work in the day, and sleep at night with a sister suffering from
small pox; and in two or three instances we mot with schools in houses where there were
eases of small pox present. I need not mention the going out and coming in of persons
where small pox was present, and who must have carried the poison in every direction.
There is no possibility in crowded towns of isolating contagious diseases. The remedy
lies in prevention.
The disease still smoulders amongst us, bursting out suddenly and unexpectedly in
various localities, but happily much milder in form.
Diarrhoea caused 78 deaths, the next in number after small pox. This disease is
closely connected with temperature: it is a summer disease. Two deaths were referred to
cholera, one of which happened in Westcott Street, the other in London Street. Fortunately
our fears with reference to the advent of cholcra were not realised; nevertheless
those fears did not prove barren in result. Movements were made to examine, cleanse, and
drain, by Bodies unused to such exertions. “I can testify," says the Home Secretary,
" to the improved perception of sanitary evils, and the alacrity and vigour infused into our
Sanitary Legislation by the presence of the cholera." Measles and whoopiDg-cough have
proved exceptionally fatal. The death rate was higher in both, than has happened in any
of the last ten years. The deaths from fivar were exceptionally low, only 19 deaths being
attributed to that cause. The year 1364-5 witnessed 128 deaths from fever. The sixth