[Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Greenwich District].

  • Greenwich (London, England). Board of Works.
Date:
[1856]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: [Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Greenwich District]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    8/20 (page 4)
    4 The questions that will naturally be asked on the subject will be—What is the reason that, during this scourge of Cholera, all parts of your District were not visited alike? and, why did it extend its ravages to some localities more than to others? The answers to these questions have been a source of care and anxiety and deep investigation to me, and I have come to the conclusion that the following facts will form the only reply which may be relied on. Certain districts were low and ill-drained, the houses and streets badly ventilated, the inhabitants thickly crowded together, indulging in dirty habits, without proper clothing, and without the common necessaries of life. Can it be wondered at that such localities should have been more than usually afflicted with sickness, or that deaths should have occurred in a proportion much greater than in the more open parts of the neighbourhood? If we compare the District of Blackheath with the Parish of St. Nicholas, Deptford, some parts of the Parish of St. Paul, or the lower parts of Greenwich on the Banks of the River, we shall find that the one was free from any marked pestilence, whilst the population of the others was as constantly decimated by its influence. These observations do not only apply to Cholera, they are equally potent as regards other epidemics and diseases generally; whether it be Typhus Fever, Small Pox, Influenza, Scarlet Fever, or any other malady. These localities are (and will be as long as they are allowed to remain in their present condition) the focus from which will spread an infection hostile to health, and bringing direful calamities on the human race. It is true that some of us, who are more happily circumstanced in life, living in high, open situations, and possessing those comforts and luxuries which are necessary and conducive to the development of health, are sometimes afflicted with Fevers and other epidemics; but mark the difference in the violence of such attacks, and, how do we know that even these diseases are not brought upon us from the above mentioned localities, where filth and infection abound?