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witnesses have unanimously borne testimony to the accuracy of my conclusions.
The stubborn testimony of facts Has confirmed those conclusions.
And the public mind is at length reassured by the non-realisation of the
prophesied decimation of the metropolis by cholera, and by the great fact
that the health of London has been steadily improving notwithstanding
the deterioration of the river. In my Report for the week ending 4th June,
I called attention to what was then passing. The average temperature
of the air was 4.°0 higher than in previous years ; the temperature of the
water in the river exceeded 60° ; and for some past at low water the
Thames had been exceedingly offensive. Notwithstanding all this, the
public health was improving, Fever diminishing, and Diarrhoea not
appearing in the mortality returns.
There were two reasons why, enjoying peculiar opportunities for
arriving at a correct opinion, I thought it my duty to urge upon you in
1856, and subsequently, the utter fallacy of what I may now call the
great Thames-delusion. If we ignore the true cause of a disease we shall
be likely to neglect the proper remedy and to apply a wrong one. Thus
assuming that the emanations from the Thames were the main cause of
disease, it was proposed to divert the sewage from the metropolitan part
of the river, by constructing the Main Drainage System. This scheme,
although open to serious financial and engineering objections, and involving
the partial, if not total, waste of the sewage for agricultural purposes,
was resolved upon as a paramount sanitary necessity. Now, whatever
other recommendations the scheme might have, I felt assured that the
anticipation of benefit to the public health was false, and that no justification
on this ground could be pleaded for the enormous cost and
inconvenience it must entail. In the next place, while mens' minds
were rivetted upon the Thames as the source of sickness, due attention
could not be expected to be given to those measures of local and personal
hygiene by which the improvement of the common health is chiefly to be
promoted. It may be remembered that in several Vestries, resolutions
were actually moved with the view of averting the construction of
sewers. It was thought by many persons of influence to be better to live
in the midst of overflowing cesspools than to add to the defilement of
the river. Happily this idea never prevailed in Shoreditch. Great
sewerage works have been carried out. Multitudes of cesspools have
been abolished, and striking has been the improvement in the salubrity
of the district.