View report page

15
have been carried on in the same way as heretofore, and,
with one exception, without the aid of the law. The
following proceeding was successfully adopted last year:
Whenever infectious diseases were present, and particularly
when death had resulted from them, the rooms of
the houses in which such occurred were lime-whited, and
when needing it, otherwise cleansed. Much benefit must
result from this measure being thoroughly enforced; and
the carrying out of it would be materially assisted if the
landlords of small house property would adopt the more
cleanly plan of distempering the walls of rooms in the
place of papering them. Observation has afforded me
ground for suspicion that the size and paste employed in
papering rooms, when the walls are liable to dampness
from without, or from within from the condensed exhalations
arising from too many inmates, undergo decomposition,
and become the means of sustaining the activity of
any contagion which may have been present. In order
that sanitary measures should be as efficient as possible
in their ultimate application, it is desirable that they
should be carried out in single detail. The circumstances
and sanitary conditions associated with the occurrence of
every death from infectious disease, and as far as possible
with every attack of such like disease, require to be ascertained,
and, if noxious, remedied. Hence it is necessary
to know not only the locality, but the house and the room
in which infection has presented itself. For the full
attainment of the objects indicated it is imperatively
necessary that every locality should have a fixed name,
and that every house should be numbered; so that then
a reference to the death register will exactly shew the
house in which a death from infectious disease has
occurred, and furnish the first trustworthy step in