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refuse to be convinced of the contrary, that drainage has
effected nothing for the real good of the parish, must be
hopelessly prejudiced against all sanitation in this direction,
if they can shut their eyes to such a fact as I have here
ventured to refer to, and am able fully to substantiate by
statistics in my possession.*
Sickness and Mortality amongst the Union Poor.—The
column in the table (No. V., Appendix) relating to the
* That great improvement in the public health has everywhere followed the
adoption of judicious and well matured sanitation, is a fact that is daily becoming
more patent. By the sceptical on this point, the following may be read with
advantage.
" Sanitary Facts.—Some results of the works of drainage, sewerage, water
supply, and cleansing, which, within the last few years have been accomplished in
various towns in England, may be stated in figures that cannot be too well known.
In Cardiff the monstrous mortality of 33 2 per 1000 per annum has been brought
down to 22.6, and in Newport the ratio of 318 per 1,000 has given place to 21.6—
reductions of 32 per cent., or allowing for cholera and dysentery, 23 per cent. In
Salisbury, Croydon, Macclesfield, and Merthyr, the mortality has been reduced by
a fifth. In Ely, the reduction—the saving of life—has amounted to 14 per cent,
per annum; in Banbury to nearly as much. Dover has only saved 7 per cent.,
but its death rate was previously moderate for an unreformed town. In
Leicester, the total reduction is but 4£ per cent., but the fatality of typhoid fever
is little more than half what it was. So also the reduction of the general rate of
mortality is not strikingly great at Cheltenham, but its former rate, 19.4 per 1,000
was not high ; and its death rate by typhoid fever, only 8 per 10,000 before, has
been reduced below 5 per 10,000. In Bristol the full completion of the works has
been too recent for an estimate of their results, but typhoid fever has lost about a
third of its fatality, and in so large a town important savings of life result from
even small per-cental reductions of mortality. The death rate by typhoid fever has
fallen in Salisbury to a fourth of what it was; in Croydon and Stratford-on-Avon,
to about a third ; in Banbury, Warwick, Ely, Penrith, Macclesfield, Ashby-de-laZouch,
about half. The improvement in the cholera rate at each successive epidemic
in the towns reported by Dr. Buchanan, from whose report to the medical officer
of the Privy Council these statements are compiled, is equally striking. It is also
shown that the drying of the soil, which has in most cases accompanied the laying
of main sewers in the improved towns, appears to have led to the diminution of the
mortality from consumption—a diminution approaching 50 per cent, in Salisbury
and Ely; exceeding 40 per cent, in Rugby and Banbury ; amounting to about a
third in Worthing, Leicester, Newport and Macclesfield, a fourth in Cheltenham, a
fifth at Dover and Warwick, a sixth at Bristol. Cardiff and Croydon, a tenth at
Merthyr. Only one-fifth of the towns here reported on have appointed a medical
officer of health, and Bristol, with apparent timidity, only recognizes him as a
" medical inspector; " but in various towns the medical practitioners have given
their fellow-townsmen valuable unpaid services in the work of stopping the waste
of life. Mr. Simon, in presenting in his report these and similar statements relating
to 25 English towns, with an aggregate population exceeding 600,000, observes that
medical science could not from the first regard these great popular experiments in
the managemeut of the public health as of doubtful promise, but to the popular
mind they had to be judged by their actual fruits. The splendid results which
have already been secured may serve not only to confute persons who have
despaired of any great preventability of disease, but also to justify in the public
eye, and to encou rage in their noble labour, those who for years have been spending
their powers in this good work."