Part 30

Having had recent occasion to examine judicially into the matters here adverted to, I think it proper to mention that the allusions in my text were long prior to this examination, and were founded chiefly on the Registrar-General’s Reports of the time, with other official statements.--J. S., 1854.

Next, the disease was rumoured to be in London. Hope and belief are too near akin for this not to have been doubted and denied; but the last few weeks have shown, with sad incontrovertible certainty, that after only four years absence, Cholera has again obtained its footing on our soil. Six or seven hundred deaths, registered in the metropolis since the beginning of September, have already attested its presence.

Anxiously adverting to the future, and asking what may be the onward progress of the disease, we can appeal only to a narrow experience. Before us lie the records of but two complete visitations of the disease, and the commencement of this, the third. It would be a shallow philosophy that should pretend, from two observations, to predict the possible orbit of this obscurely wandering plague.

Yet I dare not disguise from you that such knowledge as we have, to justify scientific anticipation, is pregnant with threats and gloom. For--let me remind you of the past. At each former period of attack, the infection, after a certain course over Continental Europe, struck upon our eastern coast in the summer of an unforgotten year. In the northern parts of Great Britain, so soon as it had lit among the population, each time it burst forth into explosive activity, and worked its full measure of destruction without delay. More faintly it reached the South. On each occasion, indeed, at the close of summer, London was sensibly affected by the disease; but, we hoped, under a milder infliction. Here and there, within its Bills of Mortality (as at Tooting in 1848) there was thrown some astounding flash on a particular hot-bed of co-operating poison; but on the whole it seemed to the sanguine, on each occasion, that the fury of the epidemic was expending itself in our northern towns, and that the metropolis was to be comparatively spared.

Each time, at the commencement of the new year, our London mortality from Cholera seemed stationary within the limit of a few hundred deaths. Each time winter and spring allowed a long respite to our invaded City, and confirmed the omens of the hopeful.

But each time there was disappointment. Each time, as the warmth of summer requickened the exterior conditions of chemical activity, the dormant fire kindled afresh--slowly at first, but with speedy acceleration of rate. Each time, in the few weeks before Michaelmas--amid almost universal threatenings of the disease, and amid such panic of death as the metropolis had not known since the Great Plague, there suddenly fell many thousands of the population.

Thus then our position stands. Scientific prediction of phenomena can arise only in the knowledge of laws. That the phenomena of this disease, however capricious they may seem, are obedient to some absolute uniformity as yet beyond our ken--are enchained by that same rigid sequence of cause and effect which is imposed on all remaining Nature--it would be impossible to doubt. But these conditions are hitherto unknown to science. Hitherto we can speak of the facts alone, with a short empirical knowledge of their succession. Yet in this light, such as it is, the conclusion is only too obvious. If the disease, already notorious for a tendency to return on its former vestiges, repeat on this third occasion the steps of its two previous courses; or, perhaps I should rather say, if it now proceed consistently to complete a repetition which it has already half-effected; Asiatic Cholera will be severely epidemic in London in the third quarter of next year--will proceed, with a stern unflattering test, to measure the degree in which those promises of sanitary improvement have been redeemed, which the terror of its recent visitation extorted even from the supinest and most ignorant of its witnesses.

In the face of so great a danger, you will reasonably claim of your Officer of Health that he shall report to you, how far the City is already fortified against this dreadful invasion--how far the hygienic defences of life, if weak, may be strengthened--how far there remain breaches now insusceptible of repair.

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1. It forms an all-important part of these considerations for resistance to the disease, to recognise quite accurately what is its fashion of attack. Since I last addressed you on the subject, in my Report for 1849-50, the materials for correct generalisation have been very largely increased by Dr. Farr’s admirable Report to the Registrar-General on the Cholera in England, and by numerous other important publications. By collating with these works the more restricted, yet not uninstructive, experience which arose within your particular jurisdiction, I hope to have enlarged my knowledge of the subject, and to have become able with greater confidence to submit my conclusions for your acceptance.

The first and most obvious characteristic of the disease is its preference for particular localities. It is eminently a district-disease. And the conditions which determine its local settlement are demonstrable physical peculiarities.

After carefully reviewing the subject, I do not know that I need qualify, except to express more confidently, the account I formerly gave you of those peculiarities, as consisting in the conjunction of dampness with organic decomposition.

It is in respect of these conditions--especially among dense urban populations, that the level of occupied ground, relatively to the nearest water-surface, becomes of primary importance. The low level, in itself, or rather in respect of the watery dampness which it implies, is not enough to localise the pestilence. To be afloat at sea might be the safest lodging.

The sub-district of St. Peter’s, Hammersmith, averages only four feet above high-water level; that of St. Olave’s, Southwark, two feet higher; yet among the former and worse placed of these two populations, the Cholera-mortality was only 18 per 10,000; while among the latter and better placed it rose to 196--multiplying nearly eleven times the minor phenomena of a lower level. So also within your own jurisdiction. Side by side along the river lie four of your sub-districts; three at the elevation of twenty-one feet, one at the elevation of twenty-four feet. The Cholera-mortality, if simply proportioned to level, should have been nearly the same for these four sub-districts, but somewhat less in the last one than in the first three. Yet contrary was the fact; for in two of these sub-districts the Cholera-mortality, for equal numbers of population, was 4½ times as great as in the other two.

It would, therefore, appear that in certain low-lying levels--to constitute them favorable soils for the disease, there must be joined to their first condition of lowness (with the mere watery dampness which it implies) some other and second condition; one, which is of extreme frequency in such districts, though not essentially present there.

This second condition impends wherever there dwells at such levels a certain density of population; it mainly varies with the degree in which that dense population lives in the atmosphere of its own excrements and refuse. In this respect I cannot refrain from saying, that the giant error of London is its present system of drainage. Probably in considerable parts of the metropolitan area, house-drainage is extensively absent: probably in considerable parts, the sewers, from the nature of their construction, are very doubtful advantages to the districts they traverse: but the evil, before all others, to which I attach importance in relation to the present subject, is that habitual empoisonment of soil and air which is inseparable from our tidal drainage. From this influence, I doubt not, a large proportion of the metropolis has derived its liability to Cholera. A moment’s reflection is sufficient to show the immense distribution of putrefactive dampness which belongs to this vicious system. There is implied in it that the entire excrementation of the metropolis (with the exception of such as, not less poisonously, lies pent beneath houses) shall sooner or later be mingled in the stream of the river, there to be rolled backward and forward amid the population; that, at low water, for many hours, this material shall be trickling over broad belts of spongy bank which then dry their contaminated mud in the sunshine, exhaling fœtor and poison; that at high water, for many hours, it shall be retained or driven back within all low-level sewers and house-drains, soaking far and wide into the soil, or leaving putrescent deposit along miles of underground brickwork, as on a deeper pavement. Sewers which, under better circumstances, should be benefactions and appliances for health in their several districts, are thus rendered inevitable sources of evil. During a large proportion of their time they are occupied in retaining or re-distributing that which it is their office to remove. They furnish chambers for an immense fæcal evaporation; at every breeze which strikes against their open mouths, at every tide which encroaches on their inward space, their gases are breathed into the upper air--wherever outlet exists, into houses, foot-paths, and carriage-way.

I am informed that in large districts on the south side of the river, this retention of sewage is prolonged for two-thirds of every tide--sixteen hours out of every twenty-four.

To you, Gentlemen, as Commissioners of Sewers for the City of London, these remarks may seem superfluous; the rather so, as the worst evils of tidal drainage are not largely exemplified within your jurisdiction. But it seems to me of extreme moment at the present time, when very costly improvements of the metropolitan drainage are about to undergo parliamentary discussion, that the public should be well aware how indispensable such improvements are for the general health of London, and how important, in fact, they are to thousands who at first sight might think themselves little interested in their completion.

To some individual householder, dwelling at a high level, all concern in the subject may seem to terminate with the defluxion of his own sewage. So that his own pipes remain clear, little cares he for the ultimate outfall of his nuisance! Perhaps, if he knew better, he would care more. His gift returns to him with increase. Down in the valley, whither his refuse runs, converge innumerable kindred contributions. From city and suburb--from an area of a hundred square miles covered by a quarter of a million of houses, with their unprecedented throng of metropolitan life, there pours into that single channel every conceivable excrement, outscouring, garbage and refuse, from man and beast, street and slum, shamble and factory, market and hospital. From the polluted bosom of the river steam up, incessantly though unseen, the vapours of a retributive poison; densest and most destructive, no doubt, along the sodden banks and stinking sewers of lowest level; but spreading over miles of land--sometimes rolled high by wind, sometimes blended low with mist, and baneful, even to their margin that curls over distant fields. For, not alone in Rotherhithe and Newington--not alone along the Effra or the Fleet, are traced the evils of this great miasm. The deepest shadows of the cloud lie here; but its outskirts darken the distance, A fever hardly to be accounted for, an infantile sickness of undue malignity, a doctor’s injunction for change of air, may at times suggest to the dweller in our healthiest suburbs, that while draining his refuse to the Thames, he receives for requital some partial workings of the gigantic poison-bed which he has contributed to maintain.

The subject of these remoter effects I refrain from pursuing, as foreign to my present purpose. That on which I wish to insist is the character of the river, in its relation to the marginal sub-districts which it habitually dampens and occasionally floods with putrescent soakage, and in its relation to the sewers of low gradient which it converts (often with their adjoining soil) into the similitude and hurtfulness of cesspools. I wish emphatically to point out, that the several parts of London have suffered, and are likely again to suffer, from Cholera, in proportion as either this malarious influence is exerted on them, or other kindred miasms are furnished by their soil. And it is my belief, from such evidence as is before me, that the general liability of London to suffer the epidemic visitation will cease, whenever an efficient and inodorous system of drainage, conveying all refuse of the metropolis beyond range of its atmosphere, shall be substituted for our present elaborate disguise of an unremoved nuisance. I deem it right to state this explicitly: not only because it is my duty to give you, in simple truth, the conclusions to which I am led by careful reflection on the facts; but likewise because--for the credit of sanitary medicine and for your justification in the awful presence of a recurrent pestilence within your jurisdiction--it ought to be thoroughly known how much of the cause is common to the entire metropolis, and has not admitted of removal by measures of partial improvement. And the circumstances will perhaps excuse me if I repeat to your Hon. Court--represented as you are both in the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers and in Parliament, where this question must shortly be discussed--that the universal reform of our metropolitan drainage, at whatever imaginable pecuniary cost, is an urgent claim and necessity, unless this great city is again, as two centuries ago, to live under the constant alarm of increasing epidemic destruction.

Reverting, however, to the more especial relations of the disease within your territory, you will remember that, among your four bank-side sub-districts, two suffered in marked excess; their Cholera-mortality having been 4½ times as great as that of the other two. The fact is instructive; because those two suffering sub-districts (though not of lower mean level than the others) were marginal to the valley of the Fleet, and were therefore exposed, more than any other part of your province, to the class of evils I have described. For a considerable part of this locality may be regarded as but recently a creek of the Thames; its shelving banks, singularly foul from ancient misuse, though now built over and paved, undergo in their lower levels very considerable soakage; while those vast sewers which lie in the mid-channel of the former river, are more liable than any within your jurisdiction, to suffer injurious interference from the action of the tide. At every such interference, and at every current of air setting up the sewers, all gases generated in these large chambers would diffuse themselves, not only in the low level, but likewise widely east and west, up those important slopes which depend on this valley for their drainage. I can easily understand that the radical cure of this district may be possible, only as part of those metropolitan improvements to which I have adverted; but I do think it of supreme importance, in reference to any such visitation as we dread, that, during the next twelve months, there should be taken every precaution which technical knowledge can suggest, for restricting, even by palliative and temporary expedients, those mischievous effects which I have endeavoured to illustrate.

New Bridge Street was built over the Fleet in 1765. The present site of Farringdon Street had been arched in thirty years earlier, for the purposes of the Fleet Market.

In describing to you the local affinities of cholera, I have intimated that, in its preference for our low metropolitan levels, it selects these soils specifically in respect of their being damp with organic putrefaction. A moment’s consideration will suffice to show that, if this be true, the higher levels of the metropolis will be exempt from the disease, only in proportion as they exempt themselves from the local conditions which invite it--only in proportion as they avail themselves of those natural advantages which their situation enables them to command. Let a district be defective in house-drainage, so that its soil is excavated by cesspools and sodden by their soakage; let its sewers be ill-constructed and foul, so that offensive gases are ventilated into the immediate breathing-air of the inhabitants; let its pavement be absent or imperfect, scattered with refuse and puddled with water;--you will easily conceive that, under these circumstances, all distinctions of level are merged in the strong identity of filth, and whatever diseases belong to putrefactive dampness of soil will strike here as readily as on the low-lying mud-banks of the river.

So, likewise, in still narrower limits--the predisposition of a house to Cholera may be stated in the same terms as define the liability of a district--viz., that the humid gases of organic decomposition, in proportion as they are breathed into one house in a district more than into other houses there, will engender the greater liability of that house, as compared with its collaterals, to suffer an invasion of Cholera. And thus it often happens, during epidemic prevalence of the disease, that sporadic cases are determined in localities which might generally claim to be free from infection: for, what avails it to be on the highest ground and the best soil, with every neighbouring facility of sewers and scavenage, if, owing to individual carelessness and filth, the conditions of dampness and putridity are by choice retained within a house, and its basement flooded with rotting liquids, or piled with accumulated refuse?

I might give you many instances in illustration of these points--showing you how, under the operation of specific sanitary faults, the Cholera-mortality of districts acquires an artificial exaltation; but few comparisons will suffice. At the period of the epidemic of 1849, your best conditioned sub-district was the north-west of the City of London Union; and (among those of the same level) your worst was the sub-district of Cripplegate, which at that time was in a very unsatisfactory state, abounding in open cesspools and their consequences. In the former of these sub-districts the Cholera-mortality per 10,000 was 19; in the latter 47; and it is easy to show that additional sanitary errors soon develop a larger fatality. Not far from your boundary, at the same level with these two sub-districts, in the Hackney-Road division of Bethnal-Green, it rose to 110; this large mortality being principally confined to a very small portion of the district, wherein (the local Registrar reports) sewers were almost entirely absent, houses were contaminated with the filth of years, streets were remaining for days uncleansed from accumulating dirt, and all waste water (including animal secretions) was uniformly thrown into the public way.

Such are the conditions under which, at any imaginable height in the metropolis, Cholera may decimate a population: such, in their worst form, were the conditions which at Merthyr-Tydvil--several hundred feet above the water-level, carried the Cholera-mortality to more than double the high metropolitan rate just mentioned. Taught by this case the power of human mismanagement to futilise the favours of Nature; taught that perverse ingenuity can construct poison-beds for the development of Cholera, high above the usual track of its devastation; one gladly turns from the horrible instructiveness of such a lesson, to gather the kindred evidence of contrast: and happily there is abundant evidence to show how much may be effected, even in the most tainted districts, to purchase a circumscribed exemption from the disease by the judicious application of sanitary care.

In the remarks which I have made on the local distribution of Cholera, you will have observed that I dwell particularly on one class of sanitary evils as concerned in its production; on that class, namely, which consists in the retention and soakage of organic refuse--on that class, which has its appointed antidote in a system of inodorous drainage, of uninterrupted pavement, of complete and punctual scavenage.

On this I particularly insist, because I believe that here is the very atmosphere without which Cholera would cease.