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27
UPON THE SANITARY STATE OF CLERKEN WELL.
the quarter) and many others owe their origin to these same maladies.
Where, again, is there a medical attendant or the parent of a family who has
not been able clearly to trace the transition in children from a perfect state of
health to a prolonged state of general debility terminating in some fatal malady,
and this induced by an attack of some zymotic disease ? How often also is the
origin of drunkenness to be traced to the feeling of weakness and general
debility, connected with these injuries to the body, forming an inducement to
the habit of taking some stimulating liquid which shall temporarily raise the
energies of the body to their natural standard ?
These zymotic diseases, then, are important beyond measure, and are
instrumental in the production of an amount of death and misery which
cannot be estimated from the valuable returns of the Registrar General. And
it obviously behoves those who are entrusted with the carrying out of the
sanitary laws, to use their powers to the utmost to prevent their diffusion.
The plague, the ague, the malignant forms of small-pox, and of spotted
fevers, have vanished from this great metropolis; let the forms of zymotic
disease still existing among us be expelled, or reduced to the utmost. Let
the habitations of the poorer classes, who dwell in hundreds upon spots of
ground not so large as should constitute a single tenement, be thoroughly
cleansed, and kept clean. They often have neither time nor means of doing
this for themselves. Let them have abundance of water. Provide baths
and wash-houses, that they may have every inducement to keep themselves
clean. Appoint public washerwomen to wash the linen of those who
are unable to wash it themselves, whereby the cost of allowance to distressed
families, and of the cases admitted into the fever hospitals, may be
prevented. Let the law be carried to its full extent in regard to the provision
of each tenement with its proper drainage, its separate closet, and the
removal of surrounding noxious emanations from local sources of contamination
to the air. Erect model lodging-houses for the poor, i. e. to be let at
rents within the reach of those who really form the poor. By attending to
these points, the amount of mortality will be diminished; the hot-beds of
disease, from which the rich are supplied, will cease to exist; the poor-rate
will fall,* and the population will be physically and morally improved.
Keep a vigilant eye upon those manufactories which have recently and are
still being brought into the district, and which contaminate by their noxious
exhalations the small amount of pure air allotted to the large number of
inhabitants. The above remarks upon the prevention of the diffusion of
zymotic diseases have special reference to the poor; but there is one point
which concerns both rich and poor. It appears to be a common notion that
everyone must have the more ordinary eruptive zymotic diseases, which I
believe produce a very large proportion of the total mortality; for we find
an almost complete apathy in general regarding the exposure of persons to
the sources of infection. Most parents are rather favourable to anyone
coming from an infected house, thinking, perhaps, that the season is very
suitable for their children to have the measles or scarlet fever. But why
should this be ? Why should children or adults have the measles or scarlet
fever any more than the itch or venereal disease? Both are common, the
*At present the poor-rates are raised by the parish having to pay the expenses of
afflicted poor persons, whose misery has, in most instances, arisen from defective
sanitary arrangements, the remedying of which ought to have been effected at the
expense of landlords who derive their substance from the miseries of the poor.