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SECOND ANNUAL REPORT
op the
MEDICAL OFFICER OF HEALTH,
TO THE VESTRY OF SAINT PANCRAS,
Gentlemen,
The time has now arrived that I should present to you my annual
statement on the sanitary condition of your parish during the year 1857. In
doing so I am glad to be able to congratulate you on having passed through
another year without experiencing the invasion of any serious epidemic; also that
your district has been less unhealthy than during ten preceding years taken together,
and that its sanitary state will admit of favorable comparison with that
of many adjoining districts.
Whilst these points are matters for sincere congratulation, there is one aspect
in which they afford grounds for serious caution. There is danger lest seasons
such as those with which we have for two years been favoured should induce
you to undervalue sanitary improvements, and to rest satisfied with the
present state of things, entirely forgetting the experience obtained when
cholera was raging in our midst, and the resolutions of reformation then formed.
The history of the past will show that such has been uniformly the effect
upon mankind of healthy periods. Sanitary reforms have always been the results
of great pestilences; and so soon as the pestilence is forgotten, sanitary precautions
are discontinued. It was so in the fourteenth century, when this country
suffered from the invasion of that most fearful pestilence known as the Black
Death. It was so three hundred years later, in 1636, when the plague again
invaded this metropolis. The very same sanitary measures which had been
adopted after the former pestilence, and had been subsequently discontinued, were
now repeated; and within thirty years the improvements then advised, many of
which were at the time carried out, had again to be enforced owing to another
invasion of the plague.
Two centuries later this country is visited with a new disease, the cholera-^
and this visitation has had the effect of inducing what has been lately characterised
as a " sanitary mania." The term is certainly not inappropriate if the
measures of precaution be only employed for two or three years, whilst the
ravages of the epidemic are fresh in our memory. But if the history of past
Sges, and the scientific discoveries of the present century be attentively considered,
and, under the direction of these guides, precautions be constantly taken,