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soon become damp in rooms where a whole family lives, and
where cooking and washing go on; and they separate
from the walls, and become a harbour for vermin.
5th. The drainage ought to be perfect; the closets
cleaned out and deodorized once a week; and no accumulation
of animal or vegetable refuse be permitted in the ash-pits,
nor in gutters and roadways.
If cleanliness of person, clothes, and houses, were
systematically taught and practised, we should then be
qualified to judge of the mode of propagation and fatality
of infectious diseases; but it will be far easier to effect the
main drainage of London, than to change the habits and
ideas of the owners and occupiers of the homes of the poor.
A second set of diseases, more or less preventable, are
those which depend on a degeneration of the human constitution,
and which carry off those who are feebly organized
from the first, or become so from want of food, air, and light.
Such are scrofula, consumption, teething, and water of the
head, and convulsions of children; from which causes combined,
we lost 55 children, and 50 adults during the quarter.
A .third set, consists of deaths by violence or accident,
arising usually from want of care, or want of knowledge, or
from breach of the moral law.
Amongst these is the common, but, when duly considered,
most painful case of infants condemned to death by slow
starvation, either through the poverty and feebleness of the
mothers, or through some moral complication. One infant
died of " inanition," in Little Chelsea Workhouse, and
another of " want of breast milk." Four others died in the
parish of the latter cause; besides that in six of the cases of
diarrhoea, the significant addition " dry-nursed," or " daughter
of a maid of all work," or " son of a housemaid," shews too
plainly what the real state of the case is.