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infectious disease such as smallpox gave constant concern, and tuberculosis
was rife among them. One report of those days stated there was room
for improvement in most of these houses, together with a recommendation
that the rooms should be painted in lighter colours. It is a matter of
surmise if this recommendation was made primarily on seSthetic grounds, as
bed bugs are more easily discernible on a light background. Today there
remain three Common Lodging Houses in the City, two for men and one
for women, all well ordered and administered.
The number and type of the majority of our City's workshops appear
to have varied little during the past 50 years, by far the greater number
of workers being engaged in the making and mending of wearing apparel
for both sexes.
Some changes in working conditions have occurred. It is rare today
to find a tailor and his family occupying one or two rooms used jointly
for their habitation and workshop; some still have their workshops in
the same house in which they reside but they are apart from the living
quarters, whilst many live in the suburbs and travel to and fro daily.
Although it is still important that their workshops should be handy
to the large businesses from which they derive their work the telephone
and quick easy transport do not make it quite so vital that they themselves
should be obliged to live on the doorstep as was certainly the case
at the beginning of the century. A casual glance at the reports reveal
for example that laundries appear to have given way to the business of
dry cleaners: Lice makers have disappeared but hairdressers, particularly
those catering for the fair sex, have multiplied. Mention of hairdressers
recalls the fact that in the early 1900's it was necessary to call their
attention to the danger of allowing petroleum spirit, used to shampoo
their male customers, to enter the drains of their premises.
The prevention and control of infectious disease is a duty which has
never been relaxed and the effect of the steps taken to combat and control
infectious disease in the last half century could fill a volume by itself.
The following examples are, however, indicative of some great differences.
In 1901 102 cases of smallpox. 475 scarlet fever, 253 diphtheria and
104 enteric fever were notified in Westminster. In 1949 there were only
2 cases of diphtheria, 48 scarlet fever, 1 enteric fever and no cases
of smallpox during the year. Disinfection was and still remains as a
preventive measure against the spread of infection. Advances in method
have been noteworthy and have for example advanced from the cumbersome
use of burning sulphur in a room sealed by old newspapers to the
lethal power of cyanide gas in specially constructed chambers for certain
purposes.
In 1900 the abatement of smoke was one of the responsibilities of the
Medical Officer of Health, who then reported he considered the smoke
from the chimneys of private dwellings was a major cause of air pollution .
in the City and commented on the fact that preventive measures could
not be taken because such chimneys were exempt from the provisions of
the smoke abatement clauses in the Public Health Act—unfortunately
this exemption still applies to private dwellings today. Great importance,
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