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work in the neighbourhood of Exmouth Street, Clerkenwell, with its
courts at the rear, and who would naturally contract the disease in a
place near which it had existed, and most frequently does exist.
This opinion is very strongly supported, as there was no other case for
several weeks afterwards. Indeed, it is no unusual circumstance
in connection with our sanitary enquiries, to find that the victims of
Typhoid and Typhus Fever in Islington are far oftener to be found
among those who necessarily spend a portion of their time in business,
or in recreation, away from the parish, or the metropolis, than
among those who are mostly at home and are not obliged to mix with
numbers of persons in factories or workshops in order to obtain a
livelihood. If our sanitary work is to progress, it cannot be by
making far-fetched and sensational or even unscrupulous statements,
which break down as soon as they are investigated, bursting or
crumbling to pieces whenever they are touched; this is indeed to
hinder sanitary work, by alienating from the cause its best friends.
It is not easy to see a single good effect resulting from such a
procedure, and it is easy to see many bad ones, not the least being
that the cry of wolf, wolf, thus raised, may some day be unheeded
when danger is not far off.
To the Vestry of Saint Mary, Islington.
Gentlemen,
Your Sanitary Committee report that, in pursuance of the
Vestry reference of March 5th, 1875, directing your Committee "To
inquire and report on the alleged unsanitary state of the Great
Northern Railway Company's field in front of Clifton Terrace," two
of your inspectors were instructed to make a house to house visitation
of the immediate neighbourhood of the field, with the view of
ascertaining the general state of the health of the locality, and the
existence, or otherwise, of any cases of illness which might be even
popularly attributed to the alleged unsanitary state of the field.
The detailed answers to these inquiries in respect to the forty-eight
houses visited are given in the Schedule A attached to this report,
the result being that, with the single exception of No. 4, Clifton
Terrace (where the fever had been, as every one knew), no other
case of fever was found to have occurred at any of these houses.
Upon the whole the general health of the neighbourhood would