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REPORTS OF MEDICAL OFFICER OF HEALTH.
Gentlemen,
Since the existence of your Board, and since sanitary matters have
begun to occupy your attention, no sufficient report has been made to you on the
physical and social peculiarities of your district. A knowledge of these is quite essential
to the right understanding of the sanitary state of the population, and of the causes
which producc those notable deviations from the standard of health which are found to
characterize St. Giles. I propose to devote the first part of this report to a consideration
of these peculiarities of the district. The second portion will be devoted to an investigation
of the sanitary condition of the district during the year 1857 ; and to an
examination of the causes of the excessive mortality which will appear. It will also
exhibit the operations of the Health Officer, and Sanitary Inspector, daring the year,
and an account of the improvements effected under their supervision.
General Report on St. Giles District.
Chapter I.—Physical Peculiarities of St. Giles' District as compared with the
Metropolis, and with adjacent Districts.
Section 1.—Area and Elevation.—This district of St. Giles, comprising the
two parishes of St. Giles in the Fields, and St. George, Bloomsbury, has an area of 245
acres, and constitutes one 318th part of the area of London, within the bills of
mortality. It is one of the eight registration divisions comprised by the Registrar
General in the term "central districts," and of this group of districts it forms about an
eighth part.
Its elevation is very favourable. Situated on an incline almost uniform from
north to south, and from west to east, its average elevation is 68 feet above Trinity
high water mark : its highest elevation being 82 feet in Alfred Mews, (Tottenham
Court Road), and its lowest 53 feet, on the boundaries of St. Giles, south of Lincoln's
Inn Fields. Thus the district participates by nature, at this elevation, rather in the
healthful breezes of Highgate and St. Pancras, than in the malarious airs of the
southern districts, and has facilities for drainage not to be surpassed in London.
There is every possible variety, however, in the extent to which the natural
advantages of the district have been used in the ventilation of streets. While no
locality possesses finer open spaces than Lincoln's Inn Fields, and Russell Square, with
the multitude of smaller squares which the wisdom of the last century provided for the