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Deaths from diphtherite occurred in the following houses:
16, Half-Moon Street, a girl set. 6, no cause to be traced;—
46,Green Street, a girl aged 4,who came ill from Suffolk;—16,
Grosvenor Mews, a boy of 3, no cause to be traced;—299,
Oxford Street, a girl æt. 4, who died on the 8th January,
having been ill since her brother and sister died of the
same malady in the same house in November. In this case
there is no reasonable doubt that the disease was originally
caused, and was kept up in the last surviving child during
her six weeks' illness, by the intensely dirty and unwholesome
state of the whole house, and by the entire absence of
drainage. The air of the house was nauseous in the extreme
; all the workmen who were employed in emptying the
cesspools, and excavating the putrid sludge which the house
stood upon, were made ill, and all were affected with sore
throat. In the last autumn, the Inspector, whilst superintending
similar operations at No. 10, Grosvenor Mews, a
house infected with scarlet fever, was suddenly smitten, as it
were, by the effluvium of a cesspool, and went home, and
took to his bed directly, for scarlet fever in a very severe
form had seized him then and there. These are amongst the
accumulating instances which show that sewer gases may be
vehicles not only of typhoid fever and diarrhoea, but of scarlet
fever also. In this case, at 299, Oxford Street, the house of
a first-class tradesman, not of the poor and ignorant, the
owner, as stated at p. 13 of our last Report, was instructed
in the measures necessary for the safety of his inmates, so
soon as the two children died in November; yet nothing
was done, till, on the death of the third child, the Local
Authority interfered for the protection of the public; and
the Inspector never found a house in so unwholesome a state.
If it be true, as is sometimes said, that diphtherite is more