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and over the field of the East London water supply. Stratford, West Ham,
and Victoria Docks arc in the rear, where the mortality was great, but then
they lie low, and the poisonous contamination would be otherwise rapidly experienced
by the process of diffusion, so close upon their borders.
It may be asked, why did not this mischief go south—across the water?
This was no doubt prevented by the influence of the tidal currents and the
river breezes. Tho Thames in its sanitary agency is little appreciated. I
regard it in relation to zymotic disease, apart from other considerations, as tho
grand conservancy of public health. It is rare to find a case of fever on its
banks at any time, and scarcely ever a death. Not one death from cholera
or diarrhoea occurred on the water's edge from the eastern verge of Limehouse
to the extremity of Wapping, the distance of a mile and a-half, during the
late epidemic.
Again, in restricting it to one part of London, it is only in common
with the visitation of epidemics, particularly cholera. In India it will take
one side of a bazaar, skipping the other for a time, one side of a river, and
soon. In the cattle plague, the same wandering character was observed;
one county, not the next, one parish, missing another. In the vegetable
world the same strange things occur. Any one acquainted with agriculture
will have noticed the potatoe disease cutting a field diagonally, one-half untouched
; turnips and other crops in tho same way,
Everything, both preceding and succeeding, the recent outbreak of
Cholera at the East End, shows it to have been an importation, atmospheric
principally, following in the track of its influence for some time felt on the
Continent, and not unlikely to have been accelerated by the free communication
of the shipping with the towns on the Coast and that of the Port of
London. But the water theory, while inconsistent in itself, takes no account
of the cases of Cholera occurring in London before the "explosion"—as it
has been termed—actually occurred. A man and his wife died from this
disease at 12, Priory Street, Bromley, in the centre of all this poisonous
effluvium, on the 27th of June, just 14 days before the first in Limehouse.
Then Hammersmith, several miles in the West, on the 29th of June loses a
man from Cholera. Then in St. Luke's Workhouse, on the 9th of July,
supplied by New River Water, a man dies brought from Hoxton New Town,
having also the same water supply. On tho 12th of July a woman died in