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and dirt, ought to be looked upon as containing possible germs of
disease, which may be lifted in vapour or blown about by the wind, and
so be inhaled or swallowed.
"It would be wise economy this summer to have the streets kept
more cleanly.''
Of Zymotic diseases, Typhus Fever proved, in this Subdistrict,
the most fatal during the year. Eight persons, five
of whom were over 20 years of age, succumbed to this disease.
Diarrhoea, which proved fatal in six cases in 1864, is
registered as the cause of death in one only during the
past year; and the Sub-district appears to have been
singularly free from those Zymotic maladies which attack
the young almost exclusively—viz., Scarlatina, Measles,
and Whooping Cough.
With the exception, then, of Typhus, there was little to
cause alarm in respect to epidemics, and the undue prevalence
of a type of fever, regarded by the profession as the
product of a peculiar miasma, may be well accounted for
by the opening of so much new ground during the construction
of the great intercepting sewer, and by the consequent
though unavoidable exposure of the contents of innumerable
house drains and their noxious surroundings.
The fact of Typhus having followed the course of the great
culvert and invading in succession Battersea, Wandsworth,
and Putney, during its construction through those localities,
very greatly favours this theory. The good effects of
efficient drainage are, however, becoming daily more and
more manifest, and the decline of this type of fever as we
approach the completion of the undertaking will contribute
to reconcile us to the temporary evil referred to.
No great fatality attended any of the affections of the
epidemic class beyond those named, and Small Pox, I am
pleased to report, resulted in death in no one instance.
Of the vaccinations in the Sub-district during the past
year, I regret to say, I cannot speak with the same
satisfaction. To a strongly and very persistently encouraged
prejudice against public vaccination, by a most
indiscreet person who, like many others, had conceived
the notion that the functions of public vaccinators
had some very intimate association with the treatment of