View report page

9
sanitary medicine presents so strong a barrier to epidemic maladies. The
Fulham District has not escaped some warnings. The Cholera Visitations
of '49 and '54 have both found here their victims. Typhus
and Scarlet Fevers have slowly gathered their votaries around them, and
other preventible diseases have numbered many amongst their conquered.
Preventive measures have, however, now fairly taken root amongst us,
and although we have yet (as we are told), some plague spots unsubdued,
many and vast improvements of a sanitary character have been accomplished.
The position of the Fulham District on the western side of the
Metropolis, the prevalence of western winds, with nothing to impede their
action, a line absorbing subsoil, immense open spaces and luxuriant
vegetation, all tend to make it pre-eminently salubrious and genial.
It is our fault if nature's gifts are wasted on us.
Many great and insurmountable difficulties, have arisen, and will yet
present themselves in grafting new upon the old conditions of its social
aspect, but it behoves all to lend a willing aid to the great work of
reform, and though, from necessity, the chief onus of the changa may fall
at present on cottage property, it is but right that those who hitherto have
fed their own resources by impoverishing others, should now in turn
make good the public damage. Moderation and respect for rights have
hitherto guided the Committee in the exercise of the powers vested in
them by the Legislature, and if all that can be desired has not been
fulfilled, there remains the satisfaction of knowing that you have
avoided oppression. Nothing can possibly exceed the adverse circumstances
existing in some parts against radical sanitary improvement. A
population thickly imbued with Irish elements of the lowest denomination
cannot otherwise than tend to offer difficulties of great magnitude in
all attempts to promote its health and cleanliness. Cottages, out of number,
constructed in the excavations of old brickfields, with the soft refuse
bricks, at a period when attention to sanitary conditions was entirely unthought
of; habitations run up in swamps and quagmires, and their
foundations three parts of the year sopped with surface water, are poor
materials to work on,
A steady and persevering supervision has, however, done much good,
and all who take a dispassionate view of the condition of the District under
your charge must admit that your labours and those of the Officers under
your direction, have not been without results. It should be remembered that
here we have to remodel an old system—a system on which has been for
centuries engrafted by slow degrees all the undesirable elements we now
wish to eradicate. It is by slow degrees alone that these can be removed.
The authorities have sanctioned (and perhaps have had no power to
prevent) the erection of property on sites perfectly unfit for human habitations;
and the total aosence of drainage to carry off the waste and surface
waters renders it almost impossible in wet seasons to prevent occasional
accumulations of mud and filth around them. As yet too the public, aye,
and even some authorities, have to learn and put in practice the grand
hygienic principle of striking at the root of Pauperism and sickness, by
devoting more attention to the physical condition of the poor.
OVERCROWDING OF DWELLINGS.
The overcrowding of dwellings is one of the most pregnant sources of
sickness and decay at all ages, and is unfortunately that, which under
present circumstances, presents formidable obstacles to amelioration.