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At this house the two basement rooms are used as work-rooms. They
measure respectively 1568 cubic feet and 883 cubic feet. In the first
room 13 girls and a woman work, seated closely at a table, the cubic
space allotted to each being thus only 112 cubic feet. In the other
room, where Emma Clark was taken with the fever, there were 6 girls
and women working—also closely seated at a table, the cubic space
allotted to each being thus 145 cubic feet. The two rooms communicate
by a doorway. It was in the smaller of the two rooms that
the fever commenced. So far as I have been enabled at present to
ascertain, the first case happened to a girl who came from a fever house
in St. Pancras; from her it spread to the woman who sat next her at the
table (a Mrs. Bonnick), then to the next girl (Ann Dorby), then to
Emma Clark, who sat near Dorby. It did not enter into the adjoining
room. Emma Clark took the disease home. She was ill at home for a
week, sleeping in a diminutive room by herself, and attended on by her
mother and sisters. She then went to the Fever Hospital. Shortly
after her return, her two sisters, aged respectively 9 and 13 years, were
taken ill and sent to the hospital. The mother was next taken ill, and
went to the hospital on January 2nd, and now the father has gone with
the same disease, every member of the family having suffered.
Now, whatever limits expediency may place upon our requirements in
the tenements of the poor, no consideration of expediency can hold good
where, for his own profit, an employer collects a number of work-people
together in a crowded room, so as to favour the spread of a disease so
dangerous as Typhus Fever. In such a case as this the full demands of
sanitary experience should be exacted, and these include something more
than mere cubic capacity in the work room. As a preliminary step,
notice to abate the overcrowding will be served upon the occupier of
the house.
EDWARD BALLARD, M.D.,
Medical Officer of Health.
Vestry Offices,
January 9th, 1865.