Report of the Medical Officer of Health of the City of London, upon the New River water, and the church yard of St. Andrew's, Holborn / presented to the Commissioners of Sewers, Tuesday, 11th December, 1855.

  • City of London (England). Commissioners of Sewers.
Date:
1855
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the Medical Officer of Health of the City of London, upon the New River water, and the church yard of St. Andrew's, Holborn / presented to the Commissioners of Sewers, Tuesday, 11th December, 1855. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    withstanding this, no one had touched this part of the church-yard for twenty years. This proves the necessity for a sufficient space to insure decomposi- tion. And, to quote from the Archdeacon's charge, My own church-yard has existed for at least seven hundred years; the parish has always been populous, and it has been, in times of pestilence, as the registers attest, the burial place of so many thousand persons, that it is incredible how space could have been found in which to deposit so many dead corpses. I submitted to my friend portions of the earth, both from the surface and from a depth of six feet below; the two specimens exhibited on analysis, no distinctive differences, but were found, as might have been expected, highly charged with ammonia. These are the admissions of the Archdeacon, and they go to prove that, in the case of his own church-yard, there is a mass of festering human remains to the depth of six feet or more, the ac- cumulation of seven hundred years, and the decom- posing products of many thousand corpses; there they are, putrifying in the very heart of the City, without being, as the Archdeacon supposes, in any way hurtful or even offensive to the inhabitants of the neighbourhood. In fact, it would appear that it is the very magnitude of the nuisance which keeps down the danger of it; for, according to a theory of the Archdeacon's, The mixture of several substances which are themselves deleterious and destructive of life, does not give to the atmo-