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passing through it; intersected, in every direction, by fifteen miles, length of open,
foetid and stagnant ditches (called in some official documents still extant.
"Stygian Pools" ) serving "the double debt to pay" of water-source and cesspool; with
its population of 15,000, mostly compressed into a narrow river-side street, backed
generally by blind alleys and courts, amidst which numerous offensive manufactories
flourished unchecked, and where the various agues, fevers, and other communicable diseases
could at any time be seen without protracted quest; that the average annual death-rate
was thirty per thousand, and the fever-rate twenty-three per thousand*, that no public
recreation ground, no provision for systematic removal of nuisances, nor for isolation of
infectious diseases existed: and that as I write, its 886 statute acres and 2¾ miles of Thames
foreshore, though carrying over 33,000 inhabitants and 5000 houses below the Trinity Level
Mark, can be favourably compared as to airiness, dry, gravelly subsoil, cleanliness, good
drainage, water supply, and sanitary improvement from time to time, with any
"ouvrier" quarter of the Metropolis; that with us, malarious illnesses and open ditches
are unknown ; that noisome trade factories exist in only two or three sites (chartered,
I regret to say, by prescriptive rights): finally, that our Park attracts visitors from all
South London: that communicable disease, as a rule, visits us more mildly than it docs
our neighbours, and that our whole annual death-rate and zymotic or fever-rate for the
last decade averaged but 18.6 per thousand, and 3.6 per thousand respectively, so that
while we have quite doubled in numbers and density per acre, our mortality is
diminished by nearly one half. Facts like these, with the rapid development of Sanitary
knowledge, are calculated to raise a confident expectation that, assisted by the advanced
public standard of general education which must then be every where prevalent, future
Boards will, in a corresponding period see their vital statistics closely approximating the
"Normas of Sanitation" so ably deduced by Mr. Edwin Chadwick.
I have now to state in detail the 1878 Rotherhithe Sanitary History, premising
that as for the first six months of the year, your Health Routine was not under my
direction, I must, as a recently-appointed Officer, request your kind indulgence for any
inaccuracies or omissions you may remark.
This past twelvemonth has been, on the whole, a healthy one: the birth-rate
higher, and the death-rate lower, than our own of 1877, or of the whole Metropolis
in the same time. Two outbreaks of imported Typhus Fever (introduced here
by infected bedding brought from neighbouring parishes), have but slightly affected our
Returns, since the prompt action you empowered your Officers to take, at once
stamped out the malady; and the epidemics of Small-pox, Whooping-cough and Diarrhoea
which occurred, though severe at first, were speedily checked by similar means.
Although the number of deaths from Scarlatina and the other chief Zymotic (or
communicable) diseases was in excess of those observed in 1877, there was a marked
diminuation of the Infantile deaths generally. To this point I must again allude.
* 1st. General Report of Health of Towns Commission.