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10
42 cases— 12 males, 30 females, reported to the Sanitary
Department from large family mansions, 36 were domestics, of
whom 25 were removed to hospital, the others treated at home.
Why spreading Diseases are so easily transferred from one
person to another.
With regard to the spreading of contagious disease, and of the
manner in which small-pox in particular is often conveyed, it
must be noted that in some streets and places cases have
frequently been found in close proximity, or behind the houses
in squares and mansions. A butler is perhaps living at home
with his family in an adjoining street, or the coachman in
the mews at the back, while tailors, milliners, or workwomen,
living in close rooms, have to send home work, or go to work,
from an infected room ; children again often take these diseases
to school.* We have numerous examples of the dangerous facility
for propagating contagious diseases by the absolutely poor and
indigent, who live in rooms, close and foul, with deficient air,
light, and ventilation, or go about without means for personal or
household cleansing. They lack not only coals, hot-water, soap,
and proper utensils; but the old, infirm, or sick people want
physical power to do washing for themselves, and have no means
of paying others. These are matters of serious consideration in
any attempts to check the ravages of spreading diseases amongst
young children of the very poor in large towns. In my annual
report for 1868-69, page 15, I suggested sanitary missionaries to
supplement our methods of assisting the struggling and
deserving poor. Out-door poor-law relief alone is necessarily
inadequate to meet all domestic wants. Fate condemns many
poor, but highly respectable people to live in the cheapest rooms,
and most suspected houses of a poor neighbourhood. There are
a number of persons who submit to any amount of privation
rather than the degradation incidental to their entering a parish
workhouse. The very conditions they live in deprive them of
the kindly services of delicate ladies and friends who would
be more inclined to visit and help them, if they lived in cleaner
rooms, or even in a well-ordered alms house.
* The explosion of gunpowder killing a few people is looked upon as a dreadful affair,
and the legislation has no scruples in isolating and depriving of their civil right, dangerous
lunatics who destroy only a score or so of people annually; it is equally fair to separate
people affected with small pox and malignant fevers, so that death may not fall upon
innocent persons who come into contact with them. Children going to school infected or
imperfectly cured, observed Sir James Simpson, are more dangerous than a tiger, or a
cobra escaping from a travelling menagerie.