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small and localized, and I have a larger subject to dwell on. I cannot go into the
accumulated evidence of the connection between imperfect drainage, cesspools, and foul
privies, and the direct production of zymotic disease, though my own experience only
is sufficient to establish such connexion; but I wish to point out that we have the
great cure for all these evils in the constant action of the atmosphere. It is only when
this open atmosphere is excluded, as when people live in close and crowded rooms,
that such emanations ordinarily become injurious.
And this brings me to the chief cause of those diseases which are in excess in
St. Giles.
If one were asked to name a single condition which shall produce at once an
excess of zymotic disease, an excess of consumption and lung disease, and a large
infantile mortality, the answer is ready and inevitable:—You may produce all these
diseases with most certainty, and you may rely on it that they shall be extremely
fatal, if you will only crowd your population together, so that they shall breathe
sufficiently impure-air. The hot atmosphere, for instance, of a small room, without
ventilation, that has been slept in at night by eight or ten people, which is rich in
carbonic acid, and reeks with the exhalation of all their skins and lungs, shall produce
you exactly the diseases which have been enumerated. Of the zymotic class,
the most fatal will probably be those which affect the lungs, such as whooping-cough
and measles; the children will die of debility and many other diseases, but very
certainly with convulsions; consumption will be prevalent, and luug disease, especially
among the infants, will be very fatal.
In overcrowding, considered as a cause of disease, must be included—dirty
rooms, filthy yards and privies, and the misuse of sanitary appliances—all of which
result immediately and inevitably from the moral depravation, and the loss of selfrespect
and responsibility, created by over-crowding.
Thus much, then, experience gives us a perfect right to affirm—that overcrowding,
with its necessary concomitants, would be the cause most adequate to
produce the effects observed, and for the existence of some such cause we should
anxiously look.
Chapter III.—Localization of Disease and Death in St. Giles, in 1857.
This investigation will comprise the distribution of the mortality from all
causes, and from those diseases which were especially fatal to St. Giles. With other
diseases it will not concern itself.
The total mortality registered in the year—1461—affected the three subdivisions
of the Registrar General in the numbers given in Table IV. of the
Appendix, the chief points of note being as follows :—
In St. George, Bloomsbury, there were 154 deaths among females, and 125
among males ; the preponderance of the former, which is an exception of the ordinary
law of the mortality of the sexes, being referable to the remarkable excess of females
inhabiting the district. The total number, 279, gives to the population (census 1851)
of St. George a mortality of 166 per 10,000, which if even a little better than the