Facts which prove the immediate necessity for the enactment of sanitary measures, to remove those causes which at present increase most fearfully the bills of mortality, and seriously affect the health of towns / by John Charles Hall.

Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Facts which prove the immediate necessity for the enactment of sanitary measures, to remove those causes which at present increase most fearfully the bills of mortality, and seriously affect the health of towns / by John Charles Hall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    extensive practice both in London and the country, may be traced to a neglect of the proper sanitary measures for clearing away those nuisances, which are the prolific nurseries of pestilence and parents of death. Near one of the houses in which the first case of fever broke out, is an open drain, into which several soughs carrying offensive and putrid matters arising from animal and vegetable bodies in a state of partial decay, ran. So offensive was the effluvia arising from it, [and it ought here to be remarked that from the peculiar nature of the ground there was no outfall for the water, which was suffered to remain until partly dried up by the sun] that we called once or twice at the door of the house and cautioned tire occupier of the danger he and his family exposed themselves to. No notice was taken by the good easy man. To his house we were first called to see his son, a youth of nineteen ; this case was a very severe one ; he recovered ; a young girl, his sister, was next attacked slightly ; the mother was the next vic- tim ; she died : another child, aged five, was then attacked most severely and recovered ; this child altogether lost the power of speech for some weeks, and even now it has not perfectly returned to him. Crossing the road, in another house a young woman was attacked with the same fever and died ; [this case was not under our care] and in the same house we afterwards attended a little boy and an old man, who both suffered most severely; and an- other case occurred within twenty yards of it. Going down a narrow lane, about 120 yards in a direct line from the house first mentioned, we attended an old man and his wife, both suffering from the same fever; and fifty yards along the same lane, in a house surrounded by heaps of filth another case of the same fever came under our immediate care. This fever was not however confined to the houses of the poor. In the same village the house- keeper of the clergyman of the parish was attacked, and she told us she had been in frequent communication with the houses in which the fever was raging. In a house in another parish we attended the mother and four children all suffering in different degrees from Gastric Fever, and on going into this house, the smell arising from imperfect drainage was so great, that an un- pleasant odour was communicated to the nose, which remained for a considerable period afterwards.