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closets of each house, eight altogether, discharged their
contents into a pipe, which communicated with a rainwater
pipe running down in an angle between the two
houses at the back, and opening at the top into a gutter
outside the nursery window. The basement was ill-ventilated
and damp, and a strong current of sewer air came
up from a decayed drain into the butler's pantry. Now,
in such a house, acute disease, according to the writer's
experience, is more likely to happen than not, either of
the choleraic, or of the throat order; besides a general
chronic state of debility. The house has been cleansed,
and arrangements made for letting in more pure air, and
for excluding sewer vapours.
Mount Street, No. 16. This was a troublesome business.
A veterinary surgeon from Yorkshire took the
upper part of the house, and the back part of the ground
floor; the latter part, consisting of rooms built on the
earth, over the yard, with no ventilation except by skylights.
One of the walls was an old spongy one, originally
intended merely as the partition wall of the yard, and was
rather damp. Some part of the water apparatus was out
of order; and it was soon afterwards found, in consequence
of complaint from the occupant of No. 17, that
the drains in the basement were in a bad state. The new
tenant, on coming downstairs in the morning after sleeping
in the house for the first time, was so astonished at the
atmosphere of it (for be it observed that when the yard
is covered over all vapours must rise into the house) that
he instantly applied to the Medical Officer of Health, and
most pertinaciously and peremptorily required him to
give a certificate of the unwholesomeness of the house,
in the hope that it would enable him to get rid of the
agreement which he, albeit a Yorkshireman and horse