View report page

8
Now Bethnal Green is notorious for poverty, overcrowding, and fever,
and yet this badly-conditioned district comes out first amongst all in its
escape from Cholera. Mile End is next in its immunity, a fact wholly to be
explained in the estimation of some probably from two to three thousand
good houses having sprung up there of late years. St. George's has a fearful
mortality, but then its overcrowding is great, it exceeds even that of Bethnal
Green. But Poplar and Bow District has the least overcrowding of all;
where one person is found there, nearly 3 are found in Limehouse, 3½ in
Mile End, and more than 4 in Bethnal Green, and approaching 6 in St.
George's-in-the-Ea&t. When Poplar, then, is seen with the fewest persons to
an acre, the highest rental, and the lowest poor rate, having 93 deaths in
each 10,000 persons, half as many more than Bethnal Green, it is too obvious
to waste a moment about it, there must be other causes at work in this
field of destruction besides sewage water, and the River Lea. St. George's
has 96 deaths in 10,000 persons, but a trifle exceeding that of Poplar, and
fully one-third more deaths than Bethnal Green. But the Limehouse District
tops all; it has lost 118 persons from Cholera and Diarrhœa, according to
the same estimate, since the outbreak in July; a district closely watched
over, in which 2,000 houses have come under my personal inspection during
the past year, up to July, resulting in many hundred different forms of
sanitary reparation.
The action of a poison—a water poison or what not—is uniform over a
community; it treats all alike under like conditions. But this Old Ford
water acts capriciously ; it skips about in finding victims; here its devastations
are heavy, but there passes by multitudes untouched. Poisons, as a
rule, lay low more readily the weak, the poor, the half-starved, and the destitute;
but these classes in the Cholera epidemic have stood the shock well,
they have come foremost out of the fray. It has crushed the scanty insulation,
it has passed by the overcrowded, spared the poor, laid low the rich,
terrible in the houses of a wealthier district, merciful in those of the impoverished,
scarcely felt on a hill, while awfully destructive in a valley.
But the water hypothesis is still held to be correct, because the mortality
is said to have been co-extensive with the water supply. Now how
can this arise ? According to the Lancet Commissioner's investigations for the
fortnight ending the 13th of August, there were 3 deaths in St. Botolph's,