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provisions necessary to provide for the accommodation and health of the masses pouring in.
The progress in the construction of sewers, drains, the supply of water, the improvement of
the dwellings, is, daily, more and more disproportionate to the necessities of the inhabitants.
The causes of disease are therefore increasing at an accelerated ratio, and may at any
moment assume an activity and a virulence beyond controul.
But let me, for one moment, call your attention to another circumstance connected with
the immigrant population. It is certain that an immense majority of the immigrants is
precisely of that class which most largely increases the danger of disease by thickening a
population. You are largely, and I strongly feel, most unjustly burdened with the
pauperism of other and wealthier districts. The burden is doubly grievous: for it taxes
your property, your labour, and gives strength to the elements of disease amongst you.
The density of the population may be expressed in other forms. Thus, I find that
there are 192 persons to every acre; or, in other words, that there is only the 005 part of
an acre to each person. In the Strand and Holborn Districts the density is somewhat
greater; but it must be borne in mind, that the parts of Shoreditch where the elements of
disease are most rife, are densely inhabited to a much greater degree than the general
average of the district, so that it is probable that there is no spot in London more crowded
with life than many places in Holywell or St. Leonard's.
I will now examine the sanitary condition of the district as expressed by the
mortality.
In 1855, the total deaths registered in Shoreditch amounted to 2985; of these, 639
were caused by typhus, smallpox, scarlatina, and other epidemic or endemic diseases. That
is, one death in every five and two-thirds arose from causes directly traceable to removeable
causes; and from facts which have been made manifest to me by the practice I have for
some time past followed, of preserving a register of all the diseases that have come before
me in the hospitals to which I have been attached, I am satisfied that the number of
deaths referred to epidemics, is very far from adequately expressing the destruction of
human life, or the impairment of health, resulting from removable causes.
In the quarter ending on the 29th March last, there died from epidemic diseases 86
persons, of which, 56 were from typhus alone—a disease which marks, perhaps, more
emphatically than any other, the action of causes injurious to health.
In the week ending on the 5th April, there died again ten persons from epidemic
diseases, of which, six were cases of typhus.
Indeed it is doubtful whether typhus—a disease really more terrible than the cholera
itself, because it is ever insidiously at work sapping the strength of the community, has
ever been absent from Shoreditch. It has made itself a home in the parish, where it lives,
—an unwelcome parasite—upon the life-blood of its hosts. It is endemic in several places
in the vicinity of the Regent's Canal; and cases are of constant occurrence, not only in